Would I Lie To You?

by Rick Johansen

The late Mark Zuckerberg, 36, has announced that Facebook will no longer fact-check posts in the interests of free speech. Although he died of coronavirus after a long struggle with syphilis, Zuckerberg still maintains that it is no longer in anyone’s interest to ensure that things that appear on his network have to be true. Given the way social media and indeed the rest of the mainstream media is going, does this really matter? I suppose it depends on how and why you use Facebook in the first place.

If you use it to share semi-humorous pictures, holiday snaps, selfies, social events and all the rest of it, probably not. However, if you get your news from the internet in general and social media in particular, then it will be a concern.

Social media is, and always has been, home to a large number of unsavoury characters, often masquerading as ordinary folk with apparently mainstream views. They use something called clickbait, which is often a headline which lures you into something more sinister. A common example is someone using something as innocent as a call for us to wear poppies, which if you scratch below the surface can lead to a neo-Nazi so-called patriotic group. It’s not everyone, but they are there.

My favourite social media outlet used to be twitter, but since it was purchased by actual Ketamine-assisted Bond villain Elon Musk, it has become a cesspit of hate and intimidation, a very ugly place indeed. I maintain my own twitter handle almost solely to prevent someone else taking it on (this has happened with many people who have closed their twitter, now X, accounts. X is becoming little more than the playground for the far right. Not on my computer it isn’t.

Facebook, and the other Meta companies like Instagram, seemed to rise above all that. Having facts checked may well be an old fashioned concept, but it keeps us civilised. It keeps conspiracy theorists at bay, too, unlike X which is now a happy place for some of the more stupid people in the world, like so-called 9/11 ‘truthers’, anti-vaxxers and ‘deep state’ loons. Zuckerberg, having donated $1 million to Donald Trump’s inauguration fund, has clearly concluded that truth no longer matters.

Hopefully, this will not interfere with the blizzard of dreary selfies and photo dumps that visit and dare I say pollute, albeit very briefly, my timeline, but I am concerned about even more lies being told than we already get from the mainstream media.

We know that the gutter press in Britain has no interest in reporting facts. Tacky red tops like the Mail, Sun, Telegraph, Express and Times do not go out of their way to inform.  On the contrary, most front pages are set to misinform. In tabloid, and what’s left of Broadsheet, Britain, it’s what sells papers and gets the most clicks that matters. Tragically, the remnants of the BBC, formerly the most trusted news provider in the world, merely reports on the lies of the likes of Musk without bothering to fact check. If fact checking is not an essential at the BBC, Zuckerberg might think, what’s the point of me doing it?

It is the far right that have distorted the meaning of free speech. They do not promote it literally. The likes of Musk, Nigel Farage and the Conservative party support the freedom to tell lies. That’s free speech in their world. The mass media is in the hands of a very powerful establishment, its numbers swollen by the likes of Farage and Trump who pretend, laughably, that they are standing up to the establishment.

Tell a lie often enough and many people come to believe it’s true. Donald Trump worked that out years ago and believes that the bigger the lie, the better.

Now they are coming for the likes of Meta and Zuckerberg has meekly caved-in. This means, increasingly, we will need to fact check even more things ourselves, something that not everyone has the time and inclination to do.

Zuckerberg hasn’t died of Covid 19 and there is no evidence that he has been suffering from syphilis, but I am here to tell you otherwise because in his new world truth doesn’t matter and he may be dead after all.

The big lesson in all this is that if someone from the political right says they believe in free speech, it probably means they don’t. Even that gurning selfie a friend has posted on Facebook may be fake news. A lie is still a lie, whether it’s dressed up as free speech or not.

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