Re:YouTube to remove content that alleges widespread electio...
by tremon on Thursday December 10, 2020 @06:25AM
(#25372500)
Facebook is not a journalist, it's a communications platform.
That's just mincing words. Facebook is very much a communications platform that determines what its users get to see. In that sense, Facebook exercises editorial control over its content, and to its users it makes no difference whether that control is automated or manual. Therefore it doesn't matter whether we classify Facebook as a "journalist", the damage done by Facebook's editorial control is the same.
Re:YouTube to remove content that alleges widespread electio...
by AnthonyMouse on Thursday December 10, 2020 @07:10PM
(#25380604)
> That's just mincing words.
It isn't. A journalist is choosing what they themselves say out of their own mouths. Anybody attributing everything that third party speakers say via Facebook as the official position of Facebook is false.
But that's also why the condemnation of balance is misdirected. Facebook is not a journalist, it's a communications platform. It isn't choosing how to spend its own words in a newspaper with a finite number of pages or a news channel with a finite amount of airtime, it's choosing what other people can say in a medium with effectively unlimited carrying capacity.
It also has a big problem because the platform is simultaneously a medium for the dissemination of information to the public and a medium for the debate of nascent ideas.
Suppose that tomorrow we got a claim of widespread election fraud that could actually be substantiated, given a sufficient amount of crowdsourcing or collaboration between experts in different fields. Now they can't even discuss it because the effort to substantiate it involves putting forth a theory that hasn't been substantiated yet?