"They are sanctioning the creation of misinformation"
Of course. But conversations that start and end with "Facebook isn't doing anything" are missing the point. They can't do anything.
Imagine walking into a room with four thousand fifth graders who were all playing card games, gambling with real money. All kinds of different games that you might not even be familiar with. And imagine that you had to be responsible for making sure that none of the kids were cheating. Facebook's problem is about a hundred thousand times harder than that.
Here are some better questions we should be asking: How much longer must we wait for Facebook to admit that bad/incorrect/misleading information is endemic to the platform? What does a post-News Feed future look like for Facebook? What should regulators do about this, if anything?
Since this is about consumer protection, here's an odd-ball idea I just thought of: Warning labels. A big fat banner on the top of Facebook: "FACEBOOK IS FOR ENTERTAINMENT PURPOSES ONLY. YOU SHOULD NOT BELIEVE WHAT YOU SEE IN YOUR NEWS FEED. FACEBOOK SHOULD NOT BE USED TO TRY TO FIGURE OUT WHAT IS GOING ON IN THE WORLD."
Is this about consumer protection? If so, I'm pretty sure the "don't believe everything you read" advice applies universally to everything everywhere and would thus need to be as prolific and utterly useless as California's Prop 65 cancer warnings.
I really didn't like this piece at all. I don't even know how to begin to engage with people like the author who pretend that there's some easy binary distinction to be made when you're hosting and moderating user-generated content.
Facebook’s community standards are not regulations. They are not laws. They are arbitrary and fuzzy guidelines developed by employees of a private company that are then open to interpretation by people paid by that company, and enforced—or not—by other employees of that company.
What even is this? Are we supposed to be surprised by this? Is the author implying that they should be regulations or laws? Am I supposed to be taking this seriously?
At least Twitter and Reddit seem to own the fact that they're madhouses. I haven't been on Craigslist in a while, but I remember seeing those alerts that were like, "This place is full of scammers! BE CAREFUL!"
Of course. But conversations that start and end with "Facebook isn't doing anything" are missing the point. They can't do anything.
Imagine walking into a room with four thousand fifth graders who were all playing card games, gambling with real money. All kinds of different games that you might not even be familiar with. And imagine that you had to be responsible for making sure that none of the kids were cheating. Facebook's problem is about a hundred thousand times harder than that.
Here are some better questions we should be asking: How much longer must we wait for Facebook to admit that bad/incorrect/misleading information is endemic to the platform? What does a post-News Feed future look like for Facebook? What should regulators do about this, if anything?
Since this is about consumer protection, here's an odd-ball idea I just thought of: Warning labels. A big fat banner on the top of Facebook: "FACEBOOK IS FOR ENTERTAINMENT PURPOSES ONLY. YOU SHOULD NOT BELIEVE WHAT YOU SEE IN YOUR NEWS FEED. FACEBOOK SHOULD NOT BE USED TO TRY TO FIGURE OUT WHAT IS GOING ON IN THE WORLD."
Is this about consumer protection? If so, I'm pretty sure the "don't believe everything you read" advice applies universally to everything everywhere and would thus need to be as prolific and utterly useless as California's Prop 65 cancer warnings.
I really didn't like this piece at all. I don't even know how to begin to engage with people like the author who pretend that there's some easy binary distinction to be made when you're hosting and moderating user-generated content.
What even is this? Are we supposed to be surprised by this? Is the author implying that they should be regulations or laws? Am I supposed to be taking this seriously?
At least Twitter and Reddit seem to own the fact that they're madhouses. I haven't been on Craigslist in a while, but I remember seeing those alerts that were like, "This place is full of scammers! BE CAREFUL!"