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Facebook comments likely to be the next censorship target of corporate media

After calling for censorship of Facebook posts, they'll turn their attention to the comments.

If youโ€™re tired of censorship and surveillance, subscribe to Reclaim The Net.

Facebook is coming under a fresh round of fire from corporate media, and this time not only for content published on the worldโ€™s 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 โ€œborrowingโ€ access to their Facebook accounts from two persons whom he describes as โ€œboomersโ€ 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 authorโ€™s mission was to discover what these unnamed boomersโ€™ Facebook feeds looked, and felt like, and the verdict is that it was โ€œa nightmare:โ€ they are able to see posts from family and friendsโ€™ domestic life, but also pro-Trump and anti-Biden memes, โ€œconspiratorial misinformation,โ€ and content that doesnโ€™t have โ€œcontext.โ€ (But thatโ€™s because theyโ€™re 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 โ€œno link or citation,โ€ as if a meme would have one. As the โ€œwar on memesโ€ often shows us, those fighting it struggle or appear to struggle to grasp the fact that memes are their own โ€œlinks and citations.โ€

But thatโ€™s not the only โ€œwarโ€ 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 โ€œagree 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 โ€œmachineโ€ that somehow makes the US divisive and extreme, and are viewed as โ€œa primary sourceโ€ of things like harassment and conspiracies.

Just like in the case of memes, the author is equally bothered that comments donโ€™t contain โ€œlinks or sources.โ€

If youโ€™re tired of censorship and surveillance, subscribe to Reclaim The Net.

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