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Posted
29 minutes ago, Gene Frenkle said:

Does anyone actually think he has a leg to stand on here?

 

Changing them from a platform to a publisher?  Yes.  If they want to editorialize, period, much less for one side and not the other, they'll have to pay a price for it.

Posted (edited)
1 hour ago, Gene Frenkle said:

Does anyone actually think he has a leg to stand on here?

His policies and rhetoric when it comes to censoring free speech are usually disconnected so I doubt he does anything.  Twitter, google, facebook, etc. are just asking for regulation if they decide to become fact checkers though.  That's supposed to be the media's job but the problem is nobody trusts the damn media anymore.

Edited by Doc Brown
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Posted
29 minutes ago, Doc Brown said:

His policies and rhetoric when it comes to censoring free speech are usually disconnected so I doubt he does anything.  Twitter, google, facebook, etc. are just asking for regulation if they decide to become fact checkers though.  That's supposed to be the media's job but the problem is nobody trusts the damn media anymore.

 

I feel like fact checking is a good idea in principle.

Posted
1 minute ago, Gene Frenkle said:

 

I feel like fact checking is a good idea in principle.

Public figures should be fact checked whenever they make public comments (interviews, press conferences, posts on social media, etc.).  However, social media platforms like twitter, facebook, etc. should not be in the fact checking business.  Once they start fact checking some tweets and ignoring others they stake out partisan positions even if they don't intend to.  

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Posted

"We have a different policy than, I think, Twitter on this. I just believe strongly that Facebook shouldn't be the arbiter of truth..."

 

"... of everything that people say online. Private companies probably shouldn't be, especially these platform companies, shouldn't be in the position of doing that."

Said Mark Zuckerberg, quoted at Fox News. Links to Fox News never seem to work, so I apologize in advance for this bad link. Why does Fox News not play well with social media?

Anyway... I'm glad to hear that from Zuckerberg. I love Zuckerberg's self-effacing term "these platform companies." I have long argued that these platform companies should uphold the free speech values that the law requires government to uphold. (Here's my 2011 argument with Bob Wright on the subject.)

Meanwhile, Trump is choosing the worst way to fight for freedom of speech — governmental suppression: "Republicans feel that Social Media Platforms totally silence conservatives voices. We will strongly regulate, or close them down, before we can ever allow this to happen." That's a tweet, quoted at CNN.

 

From the CNN article:

 
 
 
 
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Posted
9 hours ago, Doc Brown said:

Public figures should be fact checked whenever they make public comments (interviews, press conferences, posts on social media, etc.).  However, social media platforms like twitter, facebook, etc. should not be in the fact checking business.  Once they start fact checking some tweets and ignoring others they stake out partisan positions even if they don't intend to.  

 

I wouldn't trust them to do it on their own.  If they could have a regulated entity that is approved by congress to conduct the fact checks, details on what is and isn't censored and how the algorithmic search and display functionalities are conducted (which I would argue is even more important than the fact checking/censoring), then I'd be ok with it.

 

I don't trust the media nor big tech to conduct this.  

 

While we are at it, I think the media needs to be regulated.  

 

I read a really good article the other day in the WSJ from ex CBS chief Van Gordon Sauter which I highly recommend that people read.  He goes on to make the case not just that the media has made a huge leftward lurch especially now in the age of "resistance journalism" under Trump, where the mask has completely been taken off, but that the journalistic model is driven by finances as opposed to just giving straight news.  I've lamented over this for years on this board, that today's news is driven by affirmation bias.  People want to get their news where it comports with their pre existing held views.  If news organizations begin to start moving away from this, they will lose viewers, at least that's their calculation.  So the financial motive is to continue to keep providing what their base viewers want to digest.   And now in the age of Twitter, these so-called journalists want to become Twitter rock stars and the more gotcha moments they can provide for their followers, the larger their followings, likes and retweets they will get.  Which helps their careers out.  At least so they believe. 

 

Dan Abrams had a novel idea in that article:

 

 

Quote

 

Dan Abrams, ABC’s chief legal-affairs anchor and founder of the website Mediaite, has a novel but valuable idea for the media—candor. Speaking to the matter at February’s Rancho Mirage Writers Festival, Mr. Abrams said “I think the first thing that would help . . . is to admit . . . that the people in the media are left of center.”

It would be delightful if a publisher, an editor, a reporter, would just say: Yes, I am left of center! I’m proud of it. I think our reporting is accurate. It best serves the public. And the credibility of the media. So there!

 

 

 

For all publicly regulated news companies, they should have to list themselves as left, center and right leaning organizations.  That should be made clear and it should be regulated by congress to provide metrics to somehow prove this.   I'm tired of the media pretending to be objective when they are not and the public should be made very aware of where their leanings stand.  The way they could do this is not just on HOW they report the news but what stories they determine to cover, that is how their soft bias shows, at least that was the old school way.  

 

It's possible that doing something like this could get you a better overall product that may actually report just the news.  

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