At a meeting last week, publishing executives accused Facebook of scrambling to include far-right outlets with questionable journalistic standards to “balance” mainstream and trusted publications like the New York Times and the Washington Post, according to a Tuesday Wall Street Journal report.
BuzzFeed editor in chief Ben Smith and HuffPost editor in chief Lydia Polgreen specifically took issue with the Daily Caller, saying that the far right publication lacks journalistic standards, and that Facebook accommodates it to assuage conservatives who claim that publications like the Times and the Post are leftwing.
Per the Wall Street Journal, publisher of the Daily Caller Neil Patel defended his publication’s reporting.
The meeting comes shortly before executives from Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are slated to go before the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday.
I’m so glad I’m not a Facebook member. That’s one entire sea of drama and angst I’m not a party to.
FB is damned if they do, damned if they don’t.
If they include the right wing sites, knowing that their journalistic standards are not up to par, they’re leaving themselves open to the ‘fake news’ screamers.
If the don’t include them, they’re biased and librul and all those other descriptions.
There is no right answer, so how about excluding them all?
My right answer is excluding facebook. The company exists to sell you to large marketing firms. Whatever social benefit Zuckerberg’s platform may have had as a college kid’s project, it has long since left behind.
I hear the Proud Boys Gazette also made the cut…
Zuckerberg’s platform never had social benefit - all he did was make a Hot or Not ripoff to judge college women on their appearances* and then steal the actual platform from the actual inventors and then continue to steal profitable ideas from other people until he amassed all the wealth and power.
*And then he gamed his own system so only his preferences got highly ranked no matter what others thought, because that’s the kind of techbro slime that he always has been.