Does anyone else think it’s rather reckless, and dangerous, for the editorial board of one of the world’s leading newspapers to call for censorship, even of things they call disinformation?
The Poison on Facebook and Twitter Is Still Spreading
Social platforms have a responsibility to address misinformation as a systemic problem, instead of reacting to case after case.
A network of Facebook troll accounts operated by the Myanmar militaryparrots hateful rhetoric against Rohingya Muslims. Viral misinformationruns rampant on WhatsApp in Brazil, even as marketing firms there buy databases of phone numbers in order to spam voters with right-wing messaging. Homegrown campaigns spread partisan lies in the United States.
The public knows about each of these incitements because of reporting by news organizations. Social media misinformation is becoming a newsroom beat in and of itself, as journalists find themselves acting as unpaid content moderators for these platforms.
It’s not just reporters, either. Academic researchers and self-taught vigilantes alike scour through networks of misinformation on social media platforms, their findings prompting — or sometimes, failing to prompt — the takedown of propaganda.
Funny, they aren’t worried about the disinformation coming from the actual news media. Regardless, they spend a lot of time on the subject, even patting “journalists” on the back for “exposing” this stuff.
The companies have all the tools at their disposal and a profound responsibility to find exactly what journalists find — and yet, clearly, they don’t. The role that outsiders currently play, as consumer advocates and content screeners, can easily be filled in-house. And unlike journalists, companies have the power to change the very incentives that keep producing these troubling online phenomena.
In other words, they want the platforms to censor the hell out of the content posted to the sites.
But throwing light on the coordinated misinformation campaigns flaring up all around us is a matter that is much bigger than the death of print — it’s essential to democracy. It can change the course of elections and genocides. Social media platforms are doing society no favors by relying on journalists to leach the poison from their sites. Because none of this is sustainable — and we definitely don’t want to find out what happens when the merry-go-round stops working.
But, what happens when they constantly censor the content? Is not free speech essential to democracy?
The very same outlet that cheered the banning of Infowars in multiple articles just got banned by Facebook. https://t.co/dzSrnOEnex
— Paul Joseph Watson (@PrisonPlanet) October 19, 2018
In fact, the Times’ editorial mentions Alex Jones, and was upset that Twitter refused to ban him initially. People should be very, very careful when they start calling for bannings and censorship, because they could be the next target.
