Photo: Sean Gallup, Getty Imagesis
As we continue to deal with the fallout of our thin-skinned President throwing a hissy fit over Twitter daring to provide more context to conspiracy theory nonsense that Trump himself tweeted, Facebook founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, has apparently decided that it’s more important to stomp on Twitter while it’s down, rather than protect the wider internet. In a shameful display of opportunistic nonsense, Zuckerberg went on Fox News and pretended that Facebook was somehow not interested in moderating content the way Twitter did:
“We have a different policy, I think, than Twitter on this,” Zuckerberg told Dana Perino, host of the Fox News show The Daily Briefing, in an interview clip. The full interview is expected to air on Thursday.
“I just believe strongly that Facebook shouldn’t be the arbiter of truth of everything that people say online. In general, private companies probably shouldn’t be, especially these platform companies, shouldn’t be in the position of doing that,” Zuckerberg added.
Perino said that Zuckerberg told her that Facebook refuses to intervene in censoring public posts unless there’s a threat of imminent harm. She added that Facebook is “hands off” when it comes to political speech.
Sure, they have a different policy, because almost all sites have different policies, but if you compared Facebook’s policies on content moderation to Twitter’s you’d find that Facebook does vastly more moderation than Twitter has ever done and Facebook introduced similar “fact checking” efforts years ago. To pretend that Facebook doesn’t do the exact same thing that Twitter is accused of doing here is just ridiculous. And, we all agree that no platform should be “the arbiter of truth” but that’s not the same as saying “do no moderation” (and again, Facebook does a ton of moderation). As for the final claim that Facebook is “hands off” when it comes to political speech, that’s also false. Facebook is hands off on political ads, but not all political speech. And so is Twitter, in that it bars all political ads in the first place.
This is disappointing, but all too common from Facebook, the company that stabbed the open internet in the back by supporting FOSTA a few years ago. The company has clearly made the decision that it can sell out the open internet in favor of more political clout.
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