Speech must be Free, but necessarily not without Cost
It does appear that the “Interweb” and the “Brotherhood of the Facebook” do work in strange and mysterious ways. If not for cached backup copies and screenshots, one would never know the subtleties of the “Zuckerberg Effect“. In the “Mr. Zuckerberg Goes To Washington” series, I chronicled the apparent Facebook censorship of a less than flattering image of Mark Zuckerman – not a horrible image, but we shall say that he had some ‘eye issues’.
Facebook, upon being informed about their said abridgment of certain First Amendment rights, actually did something. Changes were made to remove the “safe image” placeholders and the original images restored.
I will stress, however, that what to do to get changes from Facebook is a mystery with no clear path. Stumbling into the method of seeking corrections will not work for any of us in the future. Facebook has too much at stake to be accused of censorship, and the people it serves do not need to be censored.
Making it simpler to get corrections, and then informing when said corrections have been made, is a must.
BTW: I’m going to use the original ‘offending’ image for the featured image of this post–any guesses as to whether this is really the Final Update to this series?
**The Zuckerberg Effect – In Social Networking Chaos Theory, the Zuckerberg Effect is the systematic obfuscation of data, images, concepts, beliefs, or behavior contrary to current sensitivities of the Technology ‘Masters of the Universe’ with the goal of making uncounted small incremental changes in the state of a deterministic nonlinear system called Freedom resulting in a transition to a state of Systemic Linear Control by elite Opinion Leaders.
Stock footage of the attack on Damascas, Syria provided by FakeNews CNN. Heh.
**FakeNewsAlert** that’s really your salad fixin’s growing.
It does appear, based on the test in “Mr. Zuckerberg Goes To Washington (Updated) that Facebook does, indeed, censor posts critical of Mr. Zuckerberg. Here’s the results.
Even after an obvious warning that a censorship test was being conducted, Facebook replaced the satirical meme image of Mark Zuckerberg with a “safe image” placeholder.
Final conclusions aside, in this instance Facebook could not be trusted to be a fair broker of the news. How many occurrences should it take before Facebook forfeits the trust that has been placed in it to be able to operate free of Government Regulations? Not so many, I think….
In case you missed Mr. Zuckerberg’s 2 days of Congressional Hearing testimony – “I’ll have my team get back to you on that, Congressman….” Update: an anecdotal test to determine if Mark Zuckerberg, or his “team” are so sensitive to criticism that they substitute ‘safe images’ for images, shall we say, that are critical of Zuckerberg.
This is the original Featured image from the post.
This is the image Mr. Zuckerman’s Facebook AI/Censors used to replaced the original post’s ‘Featured Image”.
This is the Screenshot of the resultant Facebook post. Here is a link to the original ThePublicEditor.com post.
And this is a Screenshot of the resultant Twitter post. Apparently, Twitter founder, Mr. Jack Dorsey, has fewer sensibilities regarding ‘memeing’ Mark Zuckerberg’s image than Facebook does.
Now we will test whether the “Safe Image” used was by ‘accident’ or by ‘design’.
