Cortez v Zuckerberg Re Fact Checking Accountability
The intelligence community has warned that Russian interference in the American electoral process is continuing and ongoing. Development of defenses and strategies to thwart attempts at online meddling should and must be created in order to ensure the integrity of the upcoming presidential and down ballot elections in 2020…
Our problems have grown in magnitude insofar as other malicious players may well seek to disrupt the process and destroy voter trust in the validity of the outcomes. Without such trust democracy is all but lost:
“Facebook defended its policy of not removing misleading or bogus political ads Thursday following withering criticism from congressional Democrats who said it could lead to election interference and voter suppression.
House Democrats, including Maxine Waters of California and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, denounced the policy during a hearing Wednesday in which founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged that Facebook would “probably” allow candidates to buy ads making false claims about their opponents.
“In a democracy, people should decide what is credible, not tech companies,” the company wrote in a statement emailed to the Associated Press on Thursday. “That’s why – like other internet platforms and broadcasters – we don’t fact check ads from politicians….”
David Klepper, Associated Press
Politics Oct 24, 2019 6:34 PM EDT
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/watch-ocasio-cortez-questioned-zuckerberg-about-false-political-ads-facebook-is-now-defending-its-policy
So here’s the question:
Do online tech giants like Facebook and Google have a duty to protect the public from false and misleading political advertising/speech and should they be held to account for failing to do so?
10/25/2019 @ 10:29 am
Why should the fact that they don’t pay for their content make them less responsible for it? If you listen to a radio station, you expect management to exercise some control over content.
10/26/2019 @ 12:18 am
Another approach has just occurred to me. We should place ads on Facebook demonizing Facebook and lying about it. We should claim Zuckerberg had secret meetings with Putin to rig the election. We should make various Me Too accusations about him. We should say that Facebook secretly contributes to Breitbart. We should claim they’re heavily involved in college student voter suppression. We should claim they favor NRA ads. We should put ads on Facebook advocating boycotting Facebook. Then let’s see what they do about content.