I’ve heard it said that trust is like an eraser: It gets smaller and smaller with every mistake made. And while that may appear to be true on the face of things, on social media sites it doesn’t usually seem to apply, does it? I mean, we can find ourselves burned over and over by outrageous fabrications and tall tales that we hear someplace like Twitter or Facebook, but somehow we keep coming back for more.
For instance, you may remember hearing about how actor Bill Murray bravely stepped up in a Tokyo bank last year and singlehandedly put the kibosh on an armed bank robbery taking place. It was all complete hogwash, but it racked up some 50,000 shares on Facebook in a matter of hours. Or how about that pic of the snow-covered Egyptian Sphinx and pyramids that popped up a few winters back? It was immediately reshared thousands of times on the Book of Face as certain-sure proof of global warming. It was, of course, also a fabrication, dropped proudly and repeatedly on the Internet’s doorstep like a half-chewed mouse of great newsworthy significance.
When the truth about that latter bit of Photoshopped balderdash finally came to light, I remember someone saying at the time that the norm for Facebook news was to “Share first, ask questions later. Better yet: Let someone else ask the questions. Better still: What was the question again?”
Well, it turns out that Facebook hasn’t simply been sitting with its figurative fingers in its digital ears, saying “na-na-na-na” while these kind of sarcastic gibes have been bandied about. The king of social media has decided it wants to make its news-ish stuff more reliable. And to do so, it’s giving its users an option that can flag spread-around stories as hoaxes. In fact, they can do more than that:
Not only can you earmark something as a “false news story,” you can also label an article as “annoying or distasteful,” as being “pornography,” as advocating “violence or harm to a person or animal” and even for going “against my views.” You guessed it, the more times a post is flagged with one of those labels, the fewer times it will show up in Facebook’s News Feeds. In your News Feed.
Of course, it feels like all those labeling choices could well open the door for editorially weeding out … just about everything. Or, well, anything that isn’t a picture of Kim Kardashian (from the chin up). And maybe that’d be the best outcome of all. We probably ought to look elsewhere for our news anyway.
I think it was comedian Bill Maher who once said, “Can we go back to using Facebook for what it was originally for—looking up exes to see how fat they got?”
Hmmm. I wonder which label I should paste on top of that little gem.
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