As a result, the general public's first impression of your story is never challenged, and it becomes accepted as truth, despite being blatantly false.
Does Facebook have no obligation, even if only a moral one, to let you at least defend your own reputation when it allows literal defamation about you to be published unmolested?
In your scenario, do I not have any other options for showing my side of the story other than Facebook?
One is supposed to be a news agency, the other is supposed to be an information sharing platform for private individuals. There is some conflict here whenever you decide to pump a specific narrative.
> In your scenario, do I not have any other options for showing my side of the story other than Facebook?
I guess you could go with alternative college newspapers? The town crier method? Creating a blog?
My point isn't necessarily that you have zero way to attempt to give your side of the story –after all, Rittenhouse's attorneys, people who saw the videos & defended Rittenhouse in public and even the NYT all produced content and were able to spread it among themselves–, but that your enemies have a tech-amplified bullhorn to distribute false claims about you (most of which are "opinion"), which you have been deprived of.
In my opinion, it's not hard to see that in the absence of additional rebuttal context, especially the kind that disrupts the original framing, people's first impression will become hardened into "their truth."
[0] https://thefederalist.com/2021/11/22/twitter-suspended-me-fo...
[1] https://www.foxnews.com/media/twitter-libertarian-party-kyle...
I think social media doesn't give people "the wrong opinion," I think it gives people opinions in general when they shouldn't have any.
This decision by Facebook probably does reverse something that was a mistake in some vague, ethical sense, but I disagree with the characterization that Facebook should be responsible for people's personal worldviews. You can't just give up all personal responsibility to Facebook and then complain when they do bad things with that power. They made a decision for business and legal reasons and we can criticize them from a business or legal perspective, but the narrative that "Facebook should have known better and it's their fault that people were misinformed" is just odd to me. It feels like a "have your cake and eat it too" situation with personal responsibility for being informed about the world.