Facebook has announced plans to rank the visibility of news sources based on whether they are “broadly trusted.”
Says Zuckerberg, evidently believing his own B.S.:
We decided that having the community determine which sources are broadly trusted would be most objective.
Here’s how this will work. As part of our ongoing quality surveys, we will now ask people whether they’re familiar with a news source and, if so, whether they trust that source. The idea is that some news organizations are only trusted by their readers or watchers, and others are broadly trusted across society even by those who don’t follow them directly. (We eliminate from the sample those who aren’t familiar with a source, so the output is a ratio of those who trust the source to those who are familiar with it.)
“Broadly trusted”? What kind of objective, rational standard is that?
Hitler was “broadly trusted” in the early years of Nazi Germany.
Broadly trusted by whom? And by what standards? Those are the questions they will not answer.
They’re appealing to a herd mentality. “No worries. Move right along, Facebook users. We’ll make sure you only see stories from sources that most people agree are trustworthy.”
You’ve heard the adage about when someone says, “I’m from the government and I’m here to help,” you had better run for your life. Similarly, a hard-core leftist like Mark Zuckerberg using “broadly trusted” as a standard for media quality means that even the pretense of diverse ideas on Facebook will soon be a thing of the past, insofar as they can use their programmers to make it so.
Facebook is a private company. They have a right to exclude whomever they wish. As leftists, they would never extend that right to others. But in reality, we all have that right with our own private businesses.
However, they ought to at least be held accountable when they lie, morally if nothing else. Clearly, Zuckerberg believes he can count on an unthinking majority with a herd mentality to accept what he says with trust and acceptance. Maybe that’s how he hopes to ride to the Presidency in a few more years.
The only answer for dissenters? Hope that somebody with a lot of money chooses to invest in a social media alternative to hard left Facebook, Google and Twitter. We need the social media equivalent of what Fox News provided for cable news back in the 1990s.
Time is running out. Because companies like Facebook and Twitter won’t wait for the next leftist government to rule in Washington DC. They will impose censorship and their own version of dictatorship voluntarily.
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