by Kara Machowski
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, posted a video on Thursday, calling out Twitter for “censoring” President Trump’s tweets by slapping a fact-checker button to two tweets regarding mail-in voting leading to voter fraud. The button led users to a link that debunks the president’s theory about absentee or mail in ballots. Thursday afternoon President Trump signed a bill that will regulate social media companies that regulate users posts, therefore, prohibiting of free speech (please see bottom of article for details on new bill).
Zuckerberg interviewed with Fox New’s Dana Perino and stated "I just believe strongly that Facebook shouldn’t be the arbiter of truth of everything that people say online, or especially these platform companies — shouldn’t be in the position of doing that”. He also stated; “I think a government choosing to censor a platform because they’re worried about censorship doesn’t strike me as the right reflex”. The President announced on Wednesday that he planned to sign an executive order on social media Thursday amongst a number of tweets that targeted Twitter.
Twitter slapped their Fact-Checker banner to President Trump's tweets after a few controversial ones, besides the false mail-in ballot claims he also targets MSNBC's Joe Scarborough of Morning Joe. The tweet implied that a death of a young assistant of Scarborough's in 2001 should be further examined and quoted an article from 2017 that implied there was foul play in the death of Lori Klausutis by True Pundit. The president tweeted a barage of tweets about Klausutis' death and Scarborough on Tuesday.
Klausutis' husband wrote to Twitter asking them to take the preisdent's tweets down regarding his wife as it was considered to be spreading propaganda about Klausitus. Thew New York Times published the letter and while Twitter apologized for the agony that the post stirred up, the post did not violate Twitter's guidelines. However, within a few days Twitter added their Fact Checking Button, which was also added to a pair of months-old tweets from a Chinese government spokesperson that falsely suggested that the coronavirus originated in the U.S..
However, amidst Zuckerberg’s comments about how social media companies shouldn’t “be an arbitrator of truth”, his own company, Facebook, has been vetting posts and news articles for years. According to Facebook’s page on how they vet false news through seven active fact-checking partners that focus on content in the United States — Politifact, Factcheck.org, Associated Press, Lead Stories, Agence France-Presse, Science Feedback, and The Daily Caller.
According to Facebook's monitoring guidelines they;
“We're committed to fighting the spread of false news on Facebook. We use both technology and human review to remove fake accounts, promote news literacy and disrupt the financial incentives of spammers. In certain countries, we also work with third-party fact-checkers who are certified through the non-partisan International Fact-Checking Network to help identify and review false news.”
Identifying false news: we identify news that may be false using signs like feedback from people on Facebook. Fact-checkers may also identify stories to review on their own.
Reviewing stories: fact-checkers will review stories, check their facts, and rate their accuracy.
Showing false stories lower in News Feed: if a fact-checker rates a story as false, it will appear lower in News Feed. This significantly reduces the number of people who see it.
Taking action against repeat offenders: Pages and websites that repeatedly share false news will see their distribution reduced and their ability to advertise removed.
Providing more context on false news: when fact-checkers write articles with more information about a story, you'll see them in Related Articles immediately below the story in your News Feed.
Notifying people when they've shared false news: you'll receive a notification if you try to share a story or have shared one in the past that's been rated false by fact-checkers. Page Admins will also be notified if they share stories rated false.
However, Zuckerberg doesn’t seem to focus on factchecking of their news postings, they are rumored to have spent $2 million in 2019 out of their $71 billion dollar revenue.
Why Facebook began outsourcing fact-checking;
Facebook’s began outsourcing fact-checking post the 2016 election; where Facebook underwent scrutiny for allowing falsified articles to be published regarding the election that actually affected voting. Netflix’s 2019 documentary, The Great Hack, which highlighted the company, Cambridge Atalytica, hired to aid Donald Trump’s 2016 US presidential election. The psychological influence that then company was able o enact on social media users was largely scrutinized and dissected while exposing a whole new realm of voter influence that congress had no idea how to approach.
The controversy landed Zuckerberg a seat in front of US Congress in 2018. Facebook’s fact-checking ramped up soon after that, with the small amount of funds compared to revenue that Facebook spends annually on monitoring of posts, one can assume that Zuckerberg may not take the responsibility as seriously as his rival, Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter; which has seemed to have created a spar between the two social media CEOs.
On Thursday afternoon the white house press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, announced that there would be changes in the signing of the social media executive order and didn’t announce what those particular changes would be, whether in the bill itself or signing on a different date.
About Section 230
What the bill is said to focus most on is a section article created in 1991, Section 230, which states;
"No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider."
The bill was created because of Wolf of Wall Street's, Jordan Belfort. Stratton Oakmont, Belford’s brokerage, sued Prodigy Services for a posting by an anonymous user on an online message board, stating that the brokerage Oakmont had engaged in criminal and fraudulent acts, essentially tarnishing the name of the company.
In the New York Supreme Court Ruling, Prodigy was mainly found liable because they vetted some postings, so the platform was found to technically be a publication instead of a free-speech platform.
In response a few congressmen foresaw how that court ruling could jeopardize future postings on online platforms (go ahead, think porn) and passed Section 230 which allows platforms to be allowed to monitor posts and delete certain postings that don’t follow their posting guidelines, yet aren’t held liable for users posts or their outcomes.
The bill signed by Trump on Thursday on social media companies:
The president signed a bill that has regulations that are said to punish social media companies for political bias. States will now find it easier to prosecute social media companies such as Facebook or Twitter and federal regulators to hold them liable if they are deemed to be unfairly curbing users' speech, such as hate by restricting their accounts or deleting their posts.
The president stated Thursday afternoon in the oval office;
"I think this, if twitter were not honorable and your going to have a guy such as this (pointing to a newspaper) then we aught to just shut it down, as far as I'm concerned, but I'd have to go through a legal process to do that. I thin that if I could legally shut it down then I would, but I think that would hurt them very badly if we didn't use it."
He added; "Currently social media giants receive an unrepresented liability shield based on the idea that their a neutral platform, which their not, not an editor with a view point. My executive order calls for new regulations under Section 230 of the communications and decency act, to make it that social media companies that engage in censoring of any political content will not be able to keep any liability shield.
That's a big deal. They have a shield, they can do what they want, they have that shield, they not going to have that shield. My executive order further instructs the Federal Trade Commission, FTC, to prohibit social media comp from engaging in any deceptive acts of practices affecting commerce. This authority resides in Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act.
I think you know it pretty well, most of you know it very well, I would think you know it quite well right? Additionally I'm directing to attorney general to work cooperatively with the states, he's going to be working very much and very closely in corporation with these states to enforce their own laws against such deceptive business practices. The states have broad and powerful authority to regulate in this arena and we encourage them to do it if they see exactly as we've been seeing.
It's um, what they're doing is tantamount to monopoly, it's tantamount to take over the airwaves, cant let it happen, otherwise we're not going to have a democracy were not going to have anything to do with the republic. Finally I am directing my administration to develop policies and procedures to ensure tax payer dollars do not go in social media company that repress free speech."
"The choices that Twitter makes what it chooses to suppress, edit, black-list, shadow, ban are editorial decisions, pure and simple. In those moments Twitter ceases to be a mutual platform and they become an editor with a view point and I think that we can saw that about others also, whether you're looking at Google or you're looking at Facebook, perhaps others. One egregious example is when they try to silence views that they disagree with by selectively applying a Fact Check, fact-check; F, A, C, T, fact check.
What they choose to fact check and what they choose to ignore or even promote is nothing more than a political activism group or political activism and it's inappropriate. If you look at what's happened, if you look at where they're going, if look at where they're coming from, I think you all see it yourselves. This censorship and bias is a threat to freedom itself. Imagine if your phone company silenced or edited your conversation social media comp are vastly more reach and power than any phone company in the unites states, more reach than your newspapers by far, more reach than a lot of your traditional forms of communication."
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