By: Wes Messamore
The Humble Libertarian
Strongly Disagree, Disagree, Agree, Strongly Agree...
I picked "Agree," and Facebook thanked me for my feedback and gave me a form to leave a comment.
This is what I wrote:
Please reinstate all the news and political pages you purged for "using clickbait headlines and other spam tactics to drive users to websites where they could target them with ads."
Someone could make a reasonable case that this description accurately describes any number of mainstream, established news media companies and their Facebook pages and websites, such as:
CNN, FoxNews, The Huffington Post, The Politico, et al.
It is impossible for Facebook to police web pages like this without evincing some form of political bias, and being unfair and arbitrary to some of its content creators and its users.
What's more, disappearing entire pages with years worth of posts and content down the memory hole is very disconcerting. Facebook is taking it upon itself to delete vast swaths of Internet history by purging these pages.
Destroying and limiting access to information is unseemly for an Internet Titan like Facebook, as it goes against the entire ethos of the Internet and the Information Age.
Indeed we are all the fortunate heirs of miraculous leaps of progress made possible by the Enlightenment attitude that we cannot be harmed by the transmission of ideas nearly as badly as we can be harmed by the repression of them.
The solution is much easier than attempting to drink the entire sea–– allow the users to decide what is fake news and what is legitimate news, through an open, and unobstructed dialogue in the comments, and allow them to police and cultivate their own individual feeds by using the block and mute features you already have.
The Humble Libertarian
Strongly Disagree, Disagree, Agree, Strongly Agree...
I picked "Agree," and Facebook thanked me for my feedback and gave me a form to leave a comment.
This is what I wrote:
Please reinstate all the news and political pages you purged for "using clickbait headlines and other spam tactics to drive users to websites where they could target them with ads."
Someone could make a reasonable case that this description accurately describes any number of mainstream, established news media companies and their Facebook pages and websites, such as:
CNN, FoxNews, The Huffington Post, The Politico, et al.
It is impossible for Facebook to police web pages like this without evincing some form of political bias, and being unfair and arbitrary to some of its content creators and its users.
What's more, disappearing entire pages with years worth of posts and content down the memory hole is very disconcerting. Facebook is taking it upon itself to delete vast swaths of Internet history by purging these pages.
Destroying and limiting access to information is unseemly for an Internet Titan like Facebook, as it goes against the entire ethos of the Internet and the Information Age.
Indeed we are all the fortunate heirs of miraculous leaps of progress made possible by the Enlightenment attitude that we cannot be harmed by the transmission of ideas nearly as badly as we can be harmed by the repression of them.
The solution is much easier than attempting to drink the entire sea–– allow the users to decide what is fake news and what is legitimate news, through an open, and unobstructed dialogue in the comments, and allow them to police and cultivate their own individual feeds by using the block and mute features you already have.
