Hi, everyone. It's Shira. Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc. were patted on the back this week for shutting down fake accounts linked to China's government that sought to discredit Hong Kong protesters.
I believed that because Twitter and Facebook are banned in China, the companies had the freedom that many global companies don't to take actions likely to generate outrage from the world's second-biggest economy.
As with everything about technology companies these days, nuance has complicated the initial positive reaction.
Shelly Banjo and Sarah Frier reported on Wednesday that, in some cases, Twitter employees have been training Chinese officials, diplomats, government agencies and media to use the social media service to push Beijing's political agenda abroad. That means the same types of disinformation or narrative-shaping views from accounts that Twitter banned are circulating from Chinese officials with the company's implicit support.
In a way, this could have been expected. Twitter and Facebook help prominent people or groups –companies, political campaigns, celebrities, athletes – set up accounts, authenticate them and coach them on best practices to attract followers online. Any big-name person or group can get this special attention.
On a spreadsheet, and maybe in the minds of Facebook and Twitter executives, it's all just content people might want to see. But when Facebook's and Twitter's white-glove treatment applies to a far-right political party, a controversial U.S. presidential candidate, a group spreading false and inflammatory rhetoric, or an authoritarian government, it is beyond awkward.
I admit that I don't know what Twitter or Facebook should do in dealing with potentially harmful propaganda from Chinese officials, or anyone else.
Should Facebook, for example, declare that Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte shouldn't be allowed to have an account because he or his allies use the social network to launch vicious online attacks against critics? Should Twitter label incendiary tweets from anti-immigrant political parties in Italy as abusive behavior, as they have (sort of) sought to do with Donald Trump? Should the companies have different rules about the hand-holding they provide to prominent people, depending on whether they're a member of the Kardashian family or a Chinese diplomat?
It's tricky, and I'm not suggesting there are easy answers. But what Shelly and Sarah wrote about gets to the heart of the contradiction in social media companies' approach to potentially harmful or outright false information.
They want to be the go-to sources of information online, but they don't want to be arbiters of what's true and good on their internet hangouts. Nor do they believe it's practical to fact-check the billions of tweets and Facebook posts that people post. Maybe the public shouldn't want any single powerful company to play this role. Instead, what we have are technicalities that don't stand up to common sense.
Twitter's approach with these Chinese officials, and that of Facebook in places such as the Philippines, seem to be that potentially harmful state-backed propaganda can be fine, unless those state-linked actors are spreading the propaganda with accounts pretending to be someone else.
In that approach, the veracity of the information isn't what matters, nor the harm it causes. What matters is the veracity of the identity of the accounts behind that information. That is a tough line to walk. –Shira Ovide
◂‹〖DownLoad〗 2020 Falling Full Movie Online released 2020. story: John Peterson lives with his partner Eric and their adopted daughter in ...
Post a Comment