“...with no fact-checkers, the responsibility for discerning truth now falls squarely on those of us who engage with social media.”
“the issue of bias remains. This is not eradicated by removing fact-checkers; it merely shifts to the community. While this could lead to more diverse perspectives and meaningful discourse, it might equally amplify extreme viewpoints.” - Premier Christianity
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What is the difference, everyone complained on both sides of the fence about the bias in the fact checking.
>>What is the difference, everyone complained on both sides of the fence about the bias in the fact checking.<<
Yup. I, for one, am happy to see “fact” checking go in favor of community notes. I got rid of my FB account 4 years ago seeing the censorship that was going on. I got rid of Twitter at that time too, but have since reactivated that one given the current X platform’s seeming commitment to free speech. Personally, I think the only content that should be removed from a site claiming section 230 is content that is illegal (incitement, etc.). If they want to censor other legal material, I think their section 230 protection should be removed as they have become a publisher rather than a platform. As long as I can filter/block authors of content I think is indecent, etc., I’d rather handle it myself than trust a supposed independent fact checker to do it.
If I still had children at home, I’d probably use one of the Christian filtering programs/sites, as long as I had the ability to adjust the filters, since no one will filter exactly the same things.
Watching European leaders fret about about not being able to suppress disfavored speech (or even negating election results when “far right” parties win) in the name of “saving democracy,” I’m even happier that we have options to keep free speech alive.
I don’t personally think Meta/Zuckerberg has “gotten religion” on free speech. I think it’s more likely he wants to get along with current leaders and political realities. Still, I will applaud any move the media platforms make in the free speech direction. I haven’t yet decided whether to reactivate my FB or not. I will probably wait a little to see whether Meta actually follows through and how it works.
Dave Barnhart
As I've watched the course of the "fact-checkers", what I've seen far too often is that "fact-checkers" will ignore known data, "helpfully" change the question to what they think should have been answered (and then accuse the speaker of lying because he didn't answer the right question), quote obsolete data to fact-check current data, and the like.
More or less, the office of "fact-checker" seems to have been irresistible to those who wanted to put their finger on the scales of truth, and the classic method of fact-checking, to ask whether the source has accurately answered the question he seems to pose, seems to have been lost.
Put differently, I've got as much bias as anybody, but it is indeed possible for even me to address a question honestly. The press, with their biases, ought to give it a try.
Side note; the best indication that I've ever seen that someone is not being honest is their insistence that they're unbiased.
Aspiring to be a stick in the mud.
Glad that Meta/Zuckerberg has changed their tune since the fact-checking with Facebook was quite ideologically progressive. I remember John Stossel's Climate Change video (where he even acknowledges some climate change) where he pulls no punches critiquing the climate alarmists. And his video was censored for spreading misinformation (even though it was their fact-checkers who were spreading misinformation about some of those whom they were censoring) which led to him (unsuccessfully) suing Meta for defamation.
Twtter/X's community notes is a better way to address misleading information, although it is tragic how Twitter/X is fertile ground for so much misinformation, slander, gossip, and defamation, especially by an army of anonymous accounts.
Due to so much misinformation through social media and even legacy media, I've learned that before I teach a workshop or several sessions on socio-cultural topics such as race, poverty, and justice, I spend an hour teaching critical thinking skills to counter the misinformation on race, poverty, and justice that so many social media influencers pass on as truth.
Free speech - but not like that!
Meta Is Blocking Links to Decentralized Instagram Competitor Pixelfed
https://www.404media.co/meta-is-blocking-links-to-decentralized-instagr…
I’m not optimistic that FB or any other social media is going to become a healthy place to get information, but one big advantage of ditching “fact checkers” is losing the word “fact.” It’s at least more honest/transparent that way… But they really should go even further and post lots of disclaimers everywhere: “There no ‘facts’ on Facebook. None. Get those elsewhere.”
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
Last week I received a notification that Facebook had removed a post sharing a blog article from our church website on the church Fb page. The only explanation given was that it had violated community guidelines against spam.
This was the first time I've ever encountered this kind of moderation on that platform, and it's impossible to do anything about it. Asking for a review was unsuccessful and there was no detail given as to precisely how something I wrote about parental authority and responsibility constituted spam.
I already discontinued Facebook for personal use during the run-up to the 2016 election. At this point, I don't think I could be tempted to go back.
Last week I received a notification that Facebook had removed a post sharing a blog article from our church website on the church Fb page. The only explanation given was that it had violated community guidelines against spam.
This was the first time I've ever encountered this kind of moderation on that platform, and it's impossible to do anything about it. Asking for a review was unsuccessful and there was no detail given as to precisely how something I wrote about parental authority and responsibility constituted spam.
I write a blog every other week and post it on our church website, church Facebook page, and it is printed in our local newspaper. I used to spend some Facebook advertising dollars in order to spread the blog post throughout our community. We could set it up to focus the ad within about 15 miles of the church. I would promote the blog post as an ad and have a picture to go along with the post so essentially they would see the picture, the title, and the first few lines. It was amazing how many people would thus interact with the post and all but a very few were positive interactions (the few were blatant God haters who we just blocked). Eventually we were banned from boosting those articles anymore. At first I could not figure out why, but they must have updated their rules, and essentially you cannot say anything that would imply a different outcome for a Christian vs a non-Christian. That would require some careful phasing when sharing the gospel.
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