5 minutes
"Social Media" to check the news!
Abdullah Al-Qamzi
Abdulla.AlQamzi@emaratalyoum.com
October 25, 2020
Can the giants of "Social Media" be trusted to scrutinize the news?
What happened two weeks ago is draining. The popular New York Post published news revealing emails belonging to the son of the US presidential candidate and former Vice President Joe Biden, and as soon as the newspaper published the news on its Facebook and Twitter accounts, the two platforms decided Blocking the news or reducing its spread, calling it unreliable and in need of scrutiny.
Question: Who is supposed to be an auditor?
Is it the New York Post, founded in 1801?
Or "Twitter" that went out into the world in 2007?
He and Facebook are the biggest promoters of conspiracy nonsense and fake news.
An unprecedented attempt - from the two tech giants that are clearly competing, together with a user base of more than three billion people - to stop people from publishing news like this, has had very serious impacts on global media and American democracy.
Today, the social media giants influence the way most people handle news and information.
Most governments do not have laws that regulate the work of these platforms, so the public - in general - is ignorant of their rights regarding how to obtain information.
The decision-making process in these platforms appears to the outside auditor arbitrary or moody, for example, why is some form of hatred or racism condemned and not others?
Why has the Facebook platform banned Holocaust denial now ... while it was supposed to prevent it for a long time?
Why are governments able to persuade Facebook to delete hostile content, such as the Turkish government, as well as to maintain the accounts of terrorist organizations such as the "Brotherhood", who deny everything that is not based on their perverted belief, while these platforms prevent the "New York Post" news ?!
"Twitter" disabled the link to the story, and claimed that it was not safe, while Facebook made it difficult to publish, on the pretext that it is under scrutiny by a third party!
The question: Who is the third party auditing the information flowing through the two platforms, and does the news of a reputable newspaper need to be checked in the first place?
Will Facebook or Twitter investigate historical facts such as the Armenian genocide, who started World War II, or who carried out the September strikes after history has documented them?
These issues are large, and they are the subject of public debate, and “social media” has no right to block them in the first place for the sake of scrutiny.
The same applies to the scandals or the news of the e-mails of Biden, who had been verified by the "social media" platforms, before it was published in the "New York Post", it might not have appeared in public, because the whole thing is politicized and has nothing to do with auditing.
As for if an aggrieved party sued Biden in the courts, then only more facts will emerge than the published ones, and the topic will turn into a general case for history.
What would happen if Facebook or Twitter decided to delete terrorist content, because it violates its content laws?
The idea of deletion is good, but it should be archived and kept available to researchers upon request. It should not be deleted, because if it is deleted, that obscures a very important point, which is how “social media” helped terrorist groups, such as ISIS, to grow.
In the end, blocking it is similar to the attempt by "social media" to conceal its role in giving these organizations platforms to spread their ideas.
Abdulla.AlQamzi@emaratalyoum.com
To read the previous articles of the writer please click on its name .
Most governments do not have laws that regulate the work of these platforms, so the public - in general - is ignorant of their rights regarding how to obtain information.
Abdulla.AlQamzi@emaratalyoum.com