Facebook is coming under a fresh round of fire from corporate media, and this time not only for content published on the worldโs biggest social network and allowing usersโ to have varied political and other affiliations โ but also because of comments that are viewed as problematic, yet left outside of reach of fact-checkers and censorship otherwise happening on the platform.
A lengthy opinion piece in the New York Times is based on the author โborrowingโ access to their Facebook accounts from two persons whom he describes as โboomersโ whose conservative views changed because of Donald Trump, turning them into Biden voters, who think that having political and ideological differences and expressing them on social networks means US politics is toxic, while those platforms are polarizing.
The authorโs mission was to discover what these unnamed boomersโ Facebook feeds looked, and felt like, and the verdict is that it was โa nightmare:โ they are able to see posts from family and friendsโ domestic life, but also pro-Trump and anti-Biden memes, โconspiratorial misinformation,โ and content that doesnโt have โcontext.โ (But thatโs because theyโre social media posts, rather than news articles or academic papers, and even those are hard to trust these days.)
Likewise, another criticism of Facebook is that its feeds contain political memes that come with โno link or citation,โ as if a meme would have one. As the โwar on memesโ often shows us, those fighting it struggle or appear to struggle to grasp the fact that memes are their own โlinks and citations.โ
But thatโs not the only โwarโ turning up in this opinion piece: another is that on comments, highlighted here as one of the ills of Facebook. The most the author seems willing to allow before denouncing them as conspiratorial threads are discussions in a friendly โagree to disagreeโ vein.
What makes comments extra dangerous, he thinks, is that unlike other types of content, they are not subject to fact-checking, moderation, and platform policing.
In an alarmist tone, the comments threads are described as resembling a โmachineโ that somehow makes the US divisive and extreme, and are viewed as โa primary sourceโ of things like harassment and conspiracies.
Just like in the case of memes, the author is equally bothered that comments donโt contain โlinks or sources.โ