Uncategorized

Journalists React After Facebook Decided To Exempt Politicians From Fact-Checking

No featured image available

Journalists criticized Facebook on Tuesday after the Silicon Valley giant announced it would not sic fact-checkers on politicians who post comments that might violate the company’s policies against publishing false content.

Reporters from The New York Times and elsewhere said the company’s decision to exempt politicians like President Donald Trump from a fact-checkers’ gavel will likely turn social media into caldrons of misinformation. Facebook said the move was done to ensure speech from politicians will be heard and seen ahead of elections.

The move was not popular in many media circles.

“It’s a good thing no politicians have ever run Facebook disinformation campaigns in order to tip elections or sow division, that’d be bad,” Kevin Roose, a tech columnist at TheNYT, said in a tweet Tuesday after Facebook announced the change in a blog post.

It’s a good thing no politicians have ever run Facebook disinformation campaigns in order to tip elections or sow division, that’d be bad. https://t.co/loW42vxplA

— Kevin Roose (@kevinroose) September 24, 2019

Others made similar remarks.

“After years of journalists, activists, and politicians trying to get Facebook to try and do literally anything to stop political bad actors from using their platforms to spread propaganda and chaos, they have officially just said, ‘fuck it,'” Ryan Broder, a senior reporter at BuzzFeed News, said in a tweet Tuesday.

After years of journalists, activists, and politicians trying to get Facebook to try and do literally anything to stop political bad actors from using their platforms to spread propaganda and chaos, they have officially just said, “fuck it.” pic.twitter.com/lwk9nfKRKC

— Ryan Broderick (@broderick) September 24, 2019

Nick Clegg, Facebook’s vice president of global affairs and communications, said in the blog post that it will treat speech from politicians “as newsworthy content that should, as a general rule, be seen and heard.” The company said that, going forward, it will exempt politicians’ speech from its third-party fact-checking.

There will also be exceptions, as Facebook’s release notes: “Where speech endangers people; and where we take money, which is why we have more stringent rules on advertising than we do for ordinary speech and rhetoric.”

Some media analysts suggested Facebook is trying to protect big-name politicians who drive content toward the platform.

“This is possibly the worst of all policy decisions on Facebook’s part: ‘valued political customers’ should be subject to special, more (not less) stringent policy enforcement criteria — as they have a bigger responsibility to the public in terms of truth, dignity and trust,” Fabio Chiusi, a researcher at AlgorithmWatch, told his Twitter followers on the day of the announcement.

This is possibly the worst of all policy decisions on Facebook’s part: “valued political customers” should be subject to special, more (not less) stringent policy enforcement criteria — as they have a bigger responsibility to the public in terms of truth, dignity and trust. https://t.co/z2JOUbi2xx

— Fabio Chiusi (@fabiochiusi) September 25, 2019

Alex Stamos, a former Facebook executive, had a different take. “The ‘these companies should control political speech by politicians in democracies’ argument is completely incompatible with everything the same proponents say about antitrust, platform power and unaccountable executives,” he said in a tweet replying to Roose’s initial tweet.

Facebook did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.