Facebook is a juggernaut in the world of tech, and this has led many to end up suggesting that the social media platform might just be a little too powerful in a lot of ways. While Facebook has repeatedly expressed a dedication to oversight and improving its transparency in a lot of ways, the tech giant is clearly not willing to let any third parties get involved in the oversight process and the latest example of this might just be the single most damning example of Facebook trying to trample free speech at every turn.
This is referring to an incident that just occurred where Facebook had the website for the Real Facebook Oversight Board, a committee of journalists, academics and legal experts, shut down after falsely accusing them of phishing and complaining to the central ISP authority about this behavior. The site is now offline, and many are condemning this as an example of Facebook not really letting any independent parties investigate its practices and suggests that the social media platform may not be quite as enthusiastic about oversight as it is trying to imply.
This act by Facebook is particularly concerning when one thinks about the fact that the company’s own oversight board is not going to be convening until a few weeks from now, and changes being made to prevent manipulation of the upcoming US election does not seem to be on the agenda. The independent oversight committee was pushing for Facebook to change its policies in order to avoid influencing the election in the same manner as 2016 when the Cambridge Analytica Scandal occurred, and Facebook’s brazen attempts to silence it critics does not bode well for the future.
It’s highly possible that top level government officials and other concerned parties are going to end up taking this pretty seriously, and they would not be willing to give Facebook any quarter after something like this has occurred. It is important to keep Facebook accountable, especially now that it holds a monopoly over the world of social media that is very quickly starting to become unassailable.
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This is referring to an incident that just occurred where Facebook had the website for the Real Facebook Oversight Board, a committee of journalists, academics and legal experts, shut down after falsely accusing them of phishing and complaining to the central ISP authority about this behavior. The site is now offline, and many are condemning this as an example of Facebook not really letting any independent parties investigate its practices and suggests that the social media platform may not be quite as enthusiastic about oversight as it is trying to imply.
This act by Facebook is particularly concerning when one thinks about the fact that the company’s own oversight board is not going to be convening until a few weeks from now, and changes being made to prevent manipulation of the upcoming US election does not seem to be on the agenda. The independent oversight committee was pushing for Facebook to change its policies in order to avoid influencing the election in the same manner as 2016 when the Cambridge Analytica Scandal occurred, and Facebook’s brazen attempts to silence it critics does not bode well for the future.
It’s highly possible that top level government officials and other concerned parties are going to end up taking this pretty seriously, and they would not be willing to give Facebook any quarter after something like this has occurred. It is important to keep Facebook accountable, especially now that it holds a monopoly over the world of social media that is very quickly starting to become unassailable.
Because nothing says ‘free speech’ quite as much as a multi-billion dollar corporation with a global monopoly getting its critics shut down & booted off the internet pic.twitter.com/wwj8ctGZgP
— Carole Cadwalladr (@carolecadwalla) October 7, 2020
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