Facebook Did Not Censor a Critical Column, but It Still Erred ⇥ kansasreflector.com
Sherman Smith, Kansas Reflector:
Facebook’s unrefined artificial intelligence misclassified a Kansas Reflector article about climate change as a security risk, and in a cascade of failures blocked the domains of news sites that published the article, according to technology experts interviewed for this story and Facebook’s public statements.
The punchline of this story was, is, and remains not that Meta maliciously censored a journalist for criticizing them, but that it built a fundamentally broken service for ubiquitously intermediating global discourse at such a large scale that it can’t even cogently explain how the service works.
This was always a sufficient explanation for the Reflector situation, and one that does not require any level of deliberate censorship or conspiracy for such a small target. Yet, it seems as though many of those who boosted the narrative that Facebook blocks critical reporting cannot seem to shake that. I got the above link from Marisa Kabas, who commented:
They’re allowing shitty AI to run their multi-billion dollar platforms, which somehow knows to block content critical of them as a cybersecurity threat.
That is not an accurate summary of what has transpired, especially if you read it with the wink-and-nod tone I imply from its phrasing. There is plenty to criticize about the control Meta exercises and the way in which it moderates its platforms without resorting to nonsense.