(O.P.'s Note: This is a terrible article written by fools - but my reasons for reposting should be obvious.)
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg says he won't scrub fake news from the site, but will just try to limit its spread by moving it lower on the News Feed. (Francois Mori/AP)
Facebook is no safe space.
Hoax peddlers, fake news barons, Sandy Hook truthers and Holocaust deniers are welcome to post their bile on the social media platform, billionaire CEO Mark Zuckerberg told tech journal Recode on Wednesday, because banning them would be counter to “giving people a voice.”
During a 90-minute interview with editor-at-large Kara Swisher, the tech titan defended his company’s decision to allow what most consider hate speech to remain on Facebook.
Wednesday afternoon defended his company’s decision to allow such groups to remain on Facebook, saying he does not believe his company should be responsible for removing questionable content because it can not determine whether a post’s intention is to mislead.
“Let’s take this closer to home. I’m Jewish, and there’s a set of people who deny that the Holocaust happened,” the 34-year-old billionaire said. “I find that deeply offensive. But at the end of the day, I don’t believe that our platform should take that down because I think there are things that different people get wrong. I don’t think they’re intentionally getting it wrong.”
The site will only remove information that contains harassment or threats of violence.
Swisher pointed out that misleading an audience may be the aim of Holocaust deniers.
Instead of censoring the information, Zuckerberg said Facebook will just not promote it.
“What we will do is we’ll say, ‘OK, you have your page, and if you’re not trying to organize harm against someone, or attacking someone, then you can put up that content on your page, even if people might disagree with it or find it offensive.’ But that doesn’t mean that we have a responsibility to make it widely distributed in News Feed,” he said.
Not everyone agrees with his stance.
“Holocaust denial is a willful, deliberate and longstanding deception tactic by anti-Semites that is incontrovertibly hateful, hurtful, and threatening to Jews,” Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said. “Facebook has a moral and ethical obligation not to allow its dissemination. ADL will continue to challenge Facebook on this position and call on them to regard Holocaust denial as a violation of their community guidelines.”
Zuckerberg stuck to his guns.
“I think the reality is also that I get things wrong when I speak publicly. I’m sure you do. I’m sure a lot of leaders and public figures we respect do, too, and I just don’t think that it is the right thing to say, ‘We’re going to take someone off the platform if they get things wrong, even multiple times,’ ” he said.
Facebook has faced withering criticism for allowing InfoWars — the Alex Jones-run website known for spreading misinformation on issues, including the Pizzagate theory of a Democratic-run child sex ring and the Sandy Hook school massacre — to remain on Facebook. InfoWars has falsely claimed the 2012 mass shooting was faked and is currently being sued by parents of those killed in the violent attack.
Facebook has been in damage control mode since it emerged that Russian trolls exploited the platform and that Cambridge Analytica, a British-based political consultancy that worked for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, obtained the data of millions of users of the popular social media site.
In April, Zuckerberg vowed before Congress that his company would combat both hate speech and fake news, but his Wednesday interview all but contradicts that sentiment.
“The approach that we’ve taken to false news is not to say, you can’t say something wrong on the internet. I think that would be too extreme,” Zuckerberg told Recode. “Everyone gets things wrong, and if we were taking down people’s accounts when they got a few things wrong, then that would be a hard world for giving people a voice and saying that you care about that.”
The tech billionaire’s stance found support in most First Amendment circles.
“While I completely deplore those who deny one of the greatest atrocities in the history of humanity, I think Facebook is right in not censoring these lies,” said Albert Fox Cahn, legal director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations of NY.
Cahn called the censorship of hate speech a slippery slope that could lead to restrictions on religious speech.
“When hate speech is driven underground it has a tendency not to be corrected,” he said. “My fear is that when we censor speech that censorship gets applied in an uneven way.”
Cahn took issue with what he said was Facebook’s tendency to limit Muslim speech, but allow right-wing hate speech. Particularly, he said that posts on atrocities against the Rohingya in Myanmar were suppressed.
The Silicon Valley mogul insisted his stance is consistent with the site’s community standards, which hold that fake news will not be removed.
“Reducing the spread of false news on Facebook is a responsibility that we take seriously,” the policy states. “We also recognize that this is a challenging and sensitive issue. We want to help people stay informed without stifling productive public discourse. There is also a fine line between false news and satire or opinion. For these reasons, we don't remove false news from Facebook but instead, significantly reduce its distribution by showing it lower in the News Feed.
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/ny-news ... story.html
