#Facebook details plans to censor news feeds and manipulate public opinion #censorship
By Andre Damon
24 January 2018
Over the past two weeks, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced plans to reduce the amount of news shown to Facebook users and to ensure that the news that does appear comes from vetted sources, to introduce censorship to the world’s largest social network.
Even as it incrementally rolls out new “features” to its product intended to prevent users from communicating freely, Facebook is publicly making the case for limiting the freedom of expression online.
The latest examples are two postings on Facebook’s corporate blog by Samidh Chakrabarti, Facebook’s Product Manager for Civic Engagement, and Cass R. Sunstein, professor at Harvard Law School and former Obama administration official. In the saccharine and Orwellian language that has become common in official apologies for censorship, the posts explain how the company plans to put into practice Zuckerberg’s plans to limit free speech on the Internet.
In his post, Samidh Chakrabarti sets out to explain how Facebook is fighting the “downsides” that social media has “for democracy.”
“As recently as 2011, when social media played a critical role in the Arab Spring in places like Tunisia, it was heralded as a technology for liberation,” Chakrabart writes. “A lot has changed since then.” Now, he and his colleagues at Facebook have come to the exact opposite conclusion: that social media “allows people to spread misinformation and corrode democracy.”
This change of heart came about as a result of the most recent presidential election, which “brought to the fore the risks of foreign meddling, ‘fake news’ and political polarization,” he writes.
The problem that emerged in the 2016 election is “polarization.” What exactly does this mean? It is not the supposed “polarization” between Democrats and Republicans, both of whom represent the corporate and financial oligarchy (including Zuckerberg, net worth(...)