Over
the weekend, we were surprised to learn that some readers were
prevented by Facebook when attempting to share Zero Hedge articles.
Subsequently it emerged that virtually every attempt to share or merely
mention an article, including in private messages, would be actively
blocked by the world's largest social network, with the explanation that
"the link you tried to visit goes against our community standards."
We were especially surprised by this action as neither prior to this
seemingly arbitrary act of censorship, nor since, were we contacted by
Facebook with an explanation of what "community standard" had been
violated or what particular filter or article had triggered the blanket
rejection of all Zero Hedge content.
To be sure, as a for-profit enterprise with its own unique set of
corporate "ethics", Facebook has every right to impose whatever filters
it desires on the media shared on its platform. It is entirely possible
that one or more posts was flagged by Facebook's "triggered" readers who
merely alerted a censorship algo which blocked all content.
Alternatively, it is just as possible that Facebook simply decided to
no longer allow its users to share our content in retaliation for our
extensive coverage of what some have dubbed the platform's "many
problems", including chronic privacy violations, mass abandonment by younger users, its gross and ongoing misrepresentation of fake users, ironically - in retrospect - its systematic censorship and back door government cooperation (those are just links from the past few weeks).
Unfortunately, as noted above, we still don't know what event
precipitated this censorship, and any attempts to get feedback from the
company with the $500 billion market cap, have so far remained
unanswered.
We would welcome this opportunity to engage Facebook in a
constructive dialog over the company's decision to impose a blanket ban
on Zero Hedge content. Alternatively, we will probably not lose much
sleep if that fails to occur: unlike other websites, we are lucky in
that only a tiny fraction of our inbound traffic originates at Facebook,
with most of our readers arriving here directly without the aid of
search engines (Google banned us from its News platform, for reasons
still unknown, shortly after the Trump victory) or referrals.
That said, with Facebook increasingly under political, regulatory and
market scrutiny for its arbitrary internal decisions on what content to
promote and what to snuff, its ever declining user engagement, and its
soaring content surveillance costs, such censorship is hardly evidence
of the platform's "openness" to discourse, its advocacy of free speech,
or its willingness to listen to and encourage non-mainstream opinions,
even if such "discourse" takes place in some fake user "click farm"
somewhere in Calcutta.
Mark Elliot Zuckerberg is an American technology entrepreneur and philanthropist. He is known for co-founding and leading Facebook as its chairman and chief executive officer.
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1 comment:
Mark Elliot Zuckerberg is an American technology entrepreneur and philanthropist. He is known for co-founding and leading Facebook as its chairman and chief executive officer.
Moar like Mark Elliot Cuckerberg.
Cuck, Cuck, Cuck......
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