Social Networks and the Price of Truth

Social Networks and the Price of Truth
Fecha de publicación: 
10 September 2018
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While Trump was making his remarks against the possible censorship of conservative speech, the news of the hacking of Cubainformacion.tv website was disclosed on Facebook.

The president of the United States, who often says that US journalists are "the enemies of the people", because they only publish "fake news", has just declared "it is dangerous for social networks such as Twitter Inc and Facebook Inc to silence the diversity of voices on their services."

Trump's remarks, made on Monday during an interview with Reuters, come at a time when social networks are struggling to monitor foreign propaganda on their platforms.

Facebook has spent more than a year and a half trying to put an end to the "fake news demon" and recently suffered the scandal of Cambridge Analytica, a company that used, as it became known only a few months ago, its platform to obtain data of 87 million people that may have been used in the presidential elections of the United States in favor of Donald Trump’s election.

Less than three months before the November elections in the United States, Planet Facebook is determined to improve its impartial network image after, thus it is ensured, there will be revealed that Russians financed thousands of false political ads in the 2016 elections.

To do this Facebook wants to investigate people who place political advertisements in national elections and require them to confirm their names and addresses. The political ads must, according to the new rules, have a note clarifying who paid for them.

Just a few days ago, Apple Inc, YouTube and Facebook decided to remove some content published by Infowars, a website run by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, the same man who claimed on the networks that the massacres caused by the Sandy Hook Elementary School and High School shootings, in Parkland, Florida, are an hoax in which the students are "used as political tools by the extreme left to boost their anti-conservative rhetoric and anti-weapon agenda."

According to the Spanish newspaper El País, Facebook said Jones's pages violated its terms of service. "We have removed it because it glorifies violence, which violates our policy on graphic violence, and uses a dehumanizing language to describe transgender, Muslim and immigrant people, thus violating our policy on hate speech and bullying."

Thus Reuters insinuates, Trump's assertions that "I'm not going to mention names, but when they take some people off Twitter or Facebook, and they're making that decision, that's really a dangerous thing, because tomorrow it can happen to you", might have to do with Jones's recent social media censorship. Trump appeared on a show produced by Infowars and hosted by Jones in December 2015, while campaigning for the White House.

Trump's fears over censorship are to some extent justified if you take into account that the president has a glass roof. A few hours after his statements, the New York governor called him "anti-American" because "he protects white supremacists, denies basic healthcare rights, discriminates people because of their sex orientation, closes doors for refugees, rips babies from their mother's arms because they want to come to this country and because he locks children in cages."

It is not the first time that users ask for the shutdown of Trump’s Twitter account because the president's tweets violate several of the rules of that social network according to which "behaviors that crosses the line into abuse are not tolerated, and that includes harassment, intimidation or the use of fear to silence other users’ voice or threatening or inciting violence."

But so far Twitter has made it clear that it does not intend to shutdown Donald Trump's account, even if the president violates its rules to combat harassment of others. The executive director of the firm Jack Dorsey told NBC in May that "it is very important to listen to the leaders directly" in order to ask for an accountability and to be able to openly address the problems, not behind closed doors. In addition, he also said that besides the presidential prominence, Trump’s account is attractive from a commercial point of view because his tweets constantly generate headlines that constitute free advertising for the company and could attract more users.

In the end, Trump continues to insult right and left in that way, as he did recently with his former adviser, Omarosa Manigault, whom he called "bitch” and nobody seems to care much about the double standard of Twitter censorship.

The same happens with Facebook and its concern over political interference in North American elections. Who has protested or questioned the role played by Cambridge Analytica in the elections of other countries?

According to data published recently by PhD in Social Communication and Sciences Rosa Miriam Elizalde: "Cambridge Analytica, the London branch of a US contractor devoted to active military operations online  for twenty-five years, has intervened in some 200 elections all over the world. "Psychological operations" were its modus operandi, its goal: to change public opinion and influence not through persuasion, but via "information control." The novelty is not the use of flyers, Radio Europa Libre or TV Martí, but rather Big Data and artificial intelligence to lock each citizen who leaves information traces on the network in an observable, parameterized and predictable bubble."

Task Force through both Facebook and Twitter, fake news and hate and bullying against Cuba dominate the scene. The same happens against countries such as Nicaragua and Venezuela. It is worth wondering. Will Facebook and other social networks take the same precautions before the political manipulation of other countries' elections or their concern over "foreign propaganda" is only exclusivity for the U.S.?

Just today, while Trump was making his remarks against the possible censorship of conservative speech, the news of the hacking of Cubainformacion.tv website, an alternative outlet online that defends the Cuban Revolution, was disclosed on Facebook. Of course no "news" agency has said anything about it and likely they never will. In this case, how much will it be necessary to pay for the news to be promoted to the largest number of people?

Does anyone know how much can truth cost in social networks?

Translated by Jorge Mesa Benjamin / CubaSi Translation Staff

 

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