Facebook ‘quietly developing censorship tool’ for China by Bill Camarda.
From the post:
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That’s one take on the events that might have led to today’s New York Times expose: it seems Facebook has tasked its development teams with “quietly develop[ing] software to suppress posts from appearing in people’s news feeds in specific geographic areas”.As “current and former Facebook employees” told the Times, Facebook wouldn’t do the suppression themselves, nor need to. Rather:
It would offer the software to enable a third party – in this case, most likely a partner Chinese company – to monitor popular stories and topics that bubble up as users share them across the social network… Facebook’s partner would then have full control to decide whether those posts should show up in users’ feeds.
This is a step beyond the censorship Facebook has already agreed to perform on behalf of governments such as Turkey, Russia and Pakistan. In those cases, Facebook agreed to remove posts that had already “gone live”. If this software were in use, offending posts could be halted before they ever appeared in a local user’s news feed.
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You can’t filter your own Facebook timeline or share your filter with other Facebook users, but the Chinese government can filter the timelines of 721,000,000+ internet users?
My proposal for Facebook filters would generate income for Facebook, filter writers and enable the 3,600,000,000+ internet users around the world to filter their own content.
All of Zuckerberg’s ideas:
Stronger detection. The most important thing we can do is improve our ability to classify misinformation. This means better technical systems to detect what people will flag as false before they do it themselves.
Easy reporting. Making it much easier for people to report stories as fake will help us catch more misinformation faster.
Third party verification. There are many respected fact checking organizations and, while we have reached out to some, we plan to learn from many more.
Warnings. We are exploring labeling stories that have been flagged as false by third parties or our community, and showing warnings when people read or share them.
Related articles quality. We are raising the bar for stories that appear in related articles under links in News Feed.
Disrupting fake news economics. A lot of misinformation is driven by financially motivated spam. We’re looking into disrupting the economics with ads policies like the one we announced earlier this week, and better ad farm detection.
Listening. We will continue to work with journalists and others in the news industry to get their input, in particular, to better understand their fact checking systems and learn from them.
Enthrone Zuckerman as Censor of the Internet.
His blinding lust to be Censor of the Internet*, is responsible for Zuckerman passing up $millions if not $billions in filtering revenue.
Facebook shareholders should question this loss of revenue at every opportunity.
* Zuckerberg’s “lust” to be “Censor of the Internet” is an inference based on the Facebook centered nature of his “ideas” for dealing with “fake news.” Unpaid censorship instead of profiting from user-centered filtering is a sign of poor judgment and/or madness.