Facebook and its Open War on Independent Media

[image: 21stcenturywire.com]

(The Real Agenda News) Facebook excuses its censorship on a plea to “end disinformation” and “sensationalism” on the internet.

It will not be enough to have a large audience or be registered as a medium, Facebook wants to measure the trust that the media possess to prioritize their content on the social network.

As of Friday, more than 2 billion active service profiles will see 4% of content generated by professional pages instead of the current 5% in Facebook’s latest attempt to control what information people have access to and what information they are banned from seeing.

Starting next week, users will have a relevant role when it comes to choosing which media are the ones with the most preponderance, Facebook claims.

The company will ask you how much you trust a medium, with an emphasis on local media and the sources used.

Mark Zuckerberg announced the first changes to give more relevance to what was published by friends and family at the expense of the official pages of brands and media:

“Following the 2018 goal, we want to make sure that time on Facebook is a time well spent,” said Zuckerberg.

In a new message on his wall he explains that he is obsessed with quality information.

“There is too much sensationalism, misinformation and polarization in the world,” he points out as support for a decision that moves the waves in which the media live a little more.

“Social networks allow information to be disseminated faster than ever, but if we do not confront these problems we will end up expanding them,” he says.

The change not only affects media pages, but also the links that particular users put on their wall.

Just as Google does when pondering the value of a medium or page to make it appear before one domain or another, the so-called Google Rank, Facebook will create its own rating system to give more visibility, or less, depending on the reliability.

As in the case of Google, the quantities and ingredients are not provided to discover their secret sauce, as they like to call success formulas in Silicon Valley.

That is perhaps because that is how Facebook, Google and other social media manage to openly censor accounts and alternative media publications.

According to the calculations of the founder, the amount of news will decrease to 20%.

In the last year, the relationship between the media and Facebook has become blurred, especially at the political level, where they have been accused of having a bias in favor of both Republicans and Democrats.

Facebook maintains that this change and its weighting model will be based on objective data, but the size of the media or its political bias will not be taken into account.

Facebook claims that the decision to delegate to the community aims to provide objectivity to the decision:

“We have decided that it is the users who decide broadly what is the most objective”.

The director emphasizes that they will not show the results of the surveys, because it would not give a real version of the whole process.

There are several points that will have weight in this valuation system: the title, who writes it, who speaks and so on.

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