Adhere to the journalistic values of honesty, courage, fairness, balance, independence, credibility and diversity, giving no priority to commercial or political over professional consideration…
— from the Aljazeera Media Network ‘Code of Ethics’ web page.
Yesterday, one of our more thoughtful Daily Post readers referred me to a couple of Australia-based political websites, where I could find — he claimed — evidence that significant voter fraud took place during the November presidential election. One of the website articles began with this statement:
Here in Australia, all we are hearing is how Trump’s claims of election fraud are baseless, and without any evidence at all. If only The ABC could afford to get the internet…?
Ah, yes. If only the news media would pay closer attention to the amazing facts shared on the internet.
I’ve often — since the founding of the Pagosa Daily Post in 2004 — advised our readers, “Don’t believe everything you read online — and that includes the Daily Post.” Two things that were never built into the design of the internet: ‘honesty’ and ‘accountability’.
And that goes double for Facebook.
Now, it’s not like misinformation is something new. I was being handed misinformation by my own parents, from the time I was two years old. For example:
Santa Claus.
The Easter Bunny.
Ronald Reagan.
Took me about two years to figure out the Easter Bunny scam, and a bit longer to stop believing in Santa Claus. (I still believe in Ronald Reagan, to this very day.) Nevertheless, it’s something of a mystery how a social media website like Facebook could turn out so badly, when it seemed so… so innocent… at the beginning.
Harvard University sophomore Mark Zuckerberg coded his first ‘social media’ website — “FaceMash” — in 2003. He wanted to create an online game for Harvard students, where you could view two side-by-side student photographs and vote on which student looked “hotter” than the other. Mr. Zuckerberg was ‘borrowing’ the photos from Harvard “facebooks” — unofficial student directories that featured photos and basic information.
I mean, really, what harm could there be? Sharing two side-by-side photographs of your fellow students — without their permission — and inviting your fellow (immature) classmates to “Like” one of the photos more than the other?
While writing the software, Mark Zuckerberg wrote the following blog entries, according to Wikipedia:
I’m a little intoxicated, not gonna lie. So what if it’s not even 10pm and it’s a Tuesday night? What? The Kirkland [dorm] facebook is open on my desktop and some of these people have pretty horrendous facebook pics. I almost want to put some of these faces next to pictures of farm animals and have people vote on which is more attractive…
…I’m not exactly sure how the farm animals are going to fit into this whole thing (you can’t really ever be sure with farm animals …) but I like the idea of comparing two people together…
The new “FaceMash” site was forwarded to several campus group list-servers, but got shut down a few days later by the Harvard administration. Mr. Zuckerberg faced expulsion — charged by the university administration with breach of security, violating copyrights, and violating individual privacy. Ultimately, the charges were dropped.
The charges were dropped because… well, breaching security, violating copyrights, and violating individual privacy is what a modern Harvard education is all about, I guess.
A few months later, in January 2004, Mr. Zuckerberg began writing code for a new website, and along with classmate Eduardo Saverin, they invested $1,000 each in the site. On February 4, 2004, a website named “TheFacebook” was launched, with membership initially restricted to Harvard University students. Within the first month, more than half the undergraduate population at Harvard was registered on the service.
If only Mr. Zuckerberg had stuck with the farm animals idea, we wouldn’t now have the world’s largest depository of flimflam, lies, and hate to worry about. (But the farm animals would have a problem.)
Facebook went public in 2012, negotiating a share price of $38. That event established the company’s value at $104 billion, the largest valuation to date for a newly listed public company. Not bad for a $1,000 investment in 2004. But things have lately gone downhill. We don’t know when, exactly, Mr. Zuckerberg first understood that housewives, businessmen, politicians and various other crooks were using his free-to-use website to facilitate some of the largest snake oil scams in the history of the world.
But that’s not the worst part for Mr. Zuckerberg. Now that he has realized that pretty much everything posted on the Facebook website is either fanciful, misleading, or an outright lie (especially from the housewives!) he has directed his staff to begin monitoring the website for misinformation.
Unfortunately, it’s nearly all misinformation. Facebook is a global communication channel created without giving the slightest thought to the problems of ‘accountability’ and ‘honesty’. The criminals, the politicians, the businessmen, the housewives — they’ve all chosen Facebook as a prime outlet for exaggeration, rumor, spin, and lies.
Billions of instances of poppycock, conveniently available to anyone with access to a computer or cell phone.
The only way to remove all the dishonesty from Facebook is to totally shut it down.
Like I said… should have stuck with farm animals.