Facebook's blackout didn't dent political ad reach (Axios exclusive)
axios.com
axios.com
This has sparked me to think about all the platforms disallowing political content during election season. I know personally google shut down ads for popular content that highly sourced and generally accepted as fact, but because of the climate shutdown.
At this point I’ve been contemplating that maybe we are wrong. Fact checking and suppressing articles on these platforms feels like a good thing to do; but we can now see even with those measures an abnormally large portion believes obvious and blatant lies.
The fundamental problem is fact checking and suppression are an intellectual fight to a system of belief, and in that fight intellectualism never wins, never has. Flat earthers will not accept science, antivaxers will not accept science, people claiming a rigged election will not accept facts, and putting up warnings are ignored because it doesn’t fit the belief
Platforms are just the megaphone, and even when that megaphone is turned off the believers will find what they need to fit their system of belief. In the short term the fight needs to happen at the source; Fox, OAN, Brietbart, etc.... as long as the content is being generated people will find it to validate their belief system. Facebook, Twitter, et la are hardly blameless but the attack on them we can see didn’t stop the problem
Meanwhile the fact checkers use technicalities of English to sway whatever they're checking. Someone did something but the statement said they took 4 steps instead of 3 before killing someone? Let's make that "mostly false" and just state with no actual evidence that due to the discrepancy of steps the "statement" is false. It's completely intellectually dishonest.
It's an entirely abusive and subversive system that has absolutely zero oversight. Nevermind twitter and Facebook use these groups as an appeal of authority when there is absolutely no authority to be found. They use the names and their authority to state "this is the truth, no questions allowed". Meanwhile they have been wrong and recently have been sued over it and lost. What this means is that none of them can be implicitly trusted to always be the truth or even factual. So why bother pushing them? They're great for pushing a narrative of reality you want to force. It coerces conversation both in topic and candor to follow exactly what the fact checker wants the reality to be despite not being an actual authority in anything.
How this isn't a bigger issue I'll never know. We'll be getting to the point where Google only lets you search approved topics and removes entries which could be "dangerous" based on some arbitrary 3rd party moral authority you never chose. You can't can't tweet information that hasn't been preverified on twitter or Facebook. It's only a matter of time before Google rolls out fact checking for their messaging app or spam filters which leverage the censorship. Then what happens to free speech?