5 minutes
"Social Media" for checking the news (2)
Abdullah Al-Qamzi
Abdulla.AlQamzi@emaratalyoum.com
01 November 2020
Most of the brainwashing and extremism operations of terrorists have occurred in the last two decades via the Internet, unlike the decades of the 1980s and 1990s.
The first witnessed the spread of cassette tapes containing radical religious lectures urging violence, and the second was video tapes of the deceased terrorist hero Osama bin Laden, who was the most famous face on the terrorist channel "Al Jazeera".
Most of the people who committed terrorist acts, including the recent French teacher beheading, were solicited by the Internet.
The elimination of extremism is not by a moody decision to delete millions of accounts, without consulting and consulting the security authorities, but by transmitting awareness messages about coexistence with the other and tolerance.
On the other side, there are governments, like the Turkish ones, that use these platforms to demand information about what they call dissidents or terrorists.
The arbitrary decisions of the "social media" giants were not scrutinized by the governments.
For example, a Twitter account that teaches the Kurdish language was suspended, and the platform did not give a single reason for this, although it returned it the next day.
The most likely scenario is that the account has stopped, because it was targeted by Ankara's cyber army, which complained that the account was broadcasting terrorist materials.
For that country ruled by a right-wing fascist "my brothers" party, anything in Kurdish is terrorist.
All companies with major influence are regulated, from hotels to oil companies to media empires.
As for the "social media" platforms, which have a market value of one trillion dollars and have billions of users, they must also be subject to regulation.
Conditions allowed these companies to grow, until today they control most of the information outlets in the world.
An executive director at the Twitter or Facebook platform could block the account of the president of an Asian, African, or even small European country, without referring to him, and even the account of the president of the most powerful democracy in the world was subjected to scrutiny.
In general, the world accepted the intervention of "Social Media" to stop the insecure content, but its intervention against the news of the "New York Post" was a turning point, which was ignored in the journalistic community, because it agrees with the American left-wing media, which does not see in the case of Ibn Biden's emails any yet. My scandals, especially since the New York Post is affiliated with the right, and Trump's allies in particular.
These platforms may have justified fears, which are fear of tampering with the facts, ahead of the US elections, and influencing the electorate, a justifiable fear if the information is from unknown accounts, and not from a popular newspaper.
To highlight additional evidence that the decisions are arbitrary. Twitter, for example, placed an alert on Russian accounts that they belong to government agencies, but it did not do the same with Turkish, Qatari and Iranian accounts, and this puts the user and the observer at a loss.
The decision to block the publication of the "New York Post" story will remain a turning point in the history of "Social Media". It will affect media institutions and journalists who cover sensitive content, and who will think a thousand times before publishing it on those platforms, for fear of being blocked for reasons that are unclear or arbitrary.
A journalist who gets leaks from reliable sources, a journalistic custom that has been in place for decades, may worry about the possibility of being scrutinized by the alleged third party on those platforms, which will not view it as a fact, but rather as unreliable information.
Abdulla.AlQamzi@emaratalyoum.com
To read the previous articles of the writer please click on its name.
Abdulla.AlQamzi@emaratalyoum.com