Tag: Facebook

The Story: There have been anti-vaccination activists long before there was such a virus as Covid-19. The anti-vaxx cause makes a variety of accusations against...

The Story: Facebook, the world's largest social network, announced last week that it is beefing up the powers of its Oversight Board, the board that...

The Story: At the time when the economic and social power of social media has become a major political issue, one of the pioneers of...

The Story: Facebook recently removed a post by a Congressional candidate, saying that it violates the prominent website's rules against "language that incites or facilitates...

The Story: A recent report from an activist group (Avaaz) highlights the great flood of misinformation reaching the public through social media, especially through Facebook,...

The Story: A social media storm erupted recently when an anonymous individual said that he has figured out an alternative to vaccination ... and the...

The Story: Swati Mylavarapu is the National Investment Chair of Pete for America, the Buttigieg campaign organization. This makes her a key advisor to the...

Democrats are fawning over Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s call for “new rules” to regulate internet companies like his — and that should worry every freedom-loving American. This is one of the richest men on earth inviting the American government to help him do what he already wants to do anyway. Let’s be perfectly clear: Every single regulatory measure Zuckerberg is calling for would benefit his company, his political allies, and himself personally. At best, regulation would just deflect from the unsavory practices of Facebook and its competitors; at worst, it would enlist government sponsorship for those practices. Democratic Sen. Mark Warner greeted Zuckerberg’s announcement by saying he was “glad to see” that “the era of the social media Wild West is over.” Of course, when Warner refers to the “social media Wild West,” he’s not talking about tech giants routinely censoring and shadow-banning conservatives, banning memes that lampoon their journalist friends, and blatantly discriminating against Republican candidates during election campaigns. Those on the left are determined to prevent a repeat of the 2016 presidential election, which is why they are so adamantly pushing for more censorship online. Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley have demanded answers from Big Tech regarding its ever-tightening campaign of censorship against the political right and Silicon Valley’s exploitation of its power over the main forums of modern public discourse to potentially swing elections — but their point has been that censorship of any kind is an affront to the American people. We don’t need leftist bureaucrats to tell us what we can say on the internet any more than we need leftist tech executives to police our speech. We don’t need an “independent body” to protect us from “harmful content” — we already have the Supreme Court, the First Amendment, and 100 years of precedent to guide our governance of public forums. Sen. Hawley, for instance, has proposed that the special privileges Facebook enjoys under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act be conditioned on it serving as a viewpoint-neutral public forum.

WASHINGTON — The American public holds negative views of social-media giants like Facebook and Twitter, with sizable majorities saying these sites do more to divide the country than unite it and spread falsehoods rather than news, according to results from the latest national NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll. But the public also believes that technology in general has more benefits than drawbacks on the economy, and respondents are split about whether the federal government should break up the largest tech companies like Apple, Amazon, Google and Facebook. “Social media — and Facebook, in particular — have some serious issues in this poll,” said Micah Roberts, a pollster at the Republican firm Public Opinion Strategies, which conducted this survey with the Democratic firm Hart Research Associates. According to the poll, 57 percent of Americans say they agree with the statement that social media sites like Facebook and Twitter do more to divide the country, while 35 percent think they do more to bring the nation together. Fifty-five percent believe social media does more to spread lies and falsehoods, versus 31 percent who say it does more to spread news and information. One variable, however, is age — with younger poll respondents less likely to believe that social media divides the country and spreads unfair attacks and rumors. Just 6 percent say they trust it either “a lot” or “quite a bit.” By contrast, the percentage of Americans not trusting companies or institutions with their personal information is lower for Amazon (28 percent), Google (37 percent) and the federal government (35 percent). Overall, 36 percent of adults view Facebook positively, while 33 percent see it negatively. “But for companies, you’d think these ratings would be [more] on the positive side.” Down on social media, but upbeat about technology Despite these sour attitudes about social media, the NBC/WSJ poll shows that Americans are upbeat about technology in general. Fifty-nine percent of respondents agree with the statement that technology has more benefits than drawbacks, because it means products and services can be cheaper and made more efficiently.