Question

Speech on Authenticity of news of the social media ​

Answer 1

Answer:

Until recent years, there had long been a stance by Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg and Jack Dorsey that Facebook and Twitter were platforms rather than publishers and therefore are not responsible for the content that is published on their platforms.

In the current climate where pandemic conspiracy theories are on the rise and racial injustice is being played out on the world stage, Facebook and Twitter’s billionaire founders have an increasing responsibility to moderate such content. Both Twitter and Facebook have been removing posts that promote violence, suspending accounts for repetitive hate content like that of Katie Hopkins’ last week and highlighting manipulated photographs and videos. However even by the time of their action, much of the damage is usually done as was illustrated recently by the ‘racist baby’ video that President Donald Trump had posted, which had already been viewed over 20 million times on Twitter and over 4 million times on Facebook by the time it was removed.