During a speech at the Georgetown University, some of the students asked questions about Facebook’s decision not to ban what some deem as questionable political ads on his social media platform.
“I believe that when it’s not absolutely clear what to do, we should err on the side of greater expression,” Zuckerberg answered. “In a democracy, I believe people should decide what is credible, not tech companies.”
Although he worries about the “erosion of truth,” he said banning such ads would be difficult because “it’s not even clear where you draw the line.” And he believes Facebook is “an important part of voice, especially for local candidates and up-and-coming challengers and advocacy groups that the media might not otherwise cover.”
This statements received a strong negative reaction by a large number of media outlets and radical left politicians more than happy to control the speech.
What is changing at Facebook?
Well, the very first thing changed will be the algorithm for your timeline and the reason for this is not ‘freedom of speech’, it’s a business related issue – the ‘engagement’ that is low right know and that is bad news for business.
In a press release from Facebook we find out more: “Today we use signals like how many people react to, comment on or share posts to determine how high they appear in News Feed.
With this update, we will also prioritize posts that spark conversations and meaningful interactions between people. To do this, we will predict which posts you might want to interact with your friends about, and show these posts higher in feed. These are posts that inspire back-and-forth discussion in the comments and posts that you might want to share and react to – whether that’s a post from a friend seeking advice, a friend asking for recommendations for a trip, or a news article or video prompting lots of discussion.
We will also prioritize posts from friends and family over public content, consistent with our News Feed values.”
What this mean exactly is that Facebook will favour the post that make you react that will ‘trigger’ you. This is why when a heated debate will start on Facebook, they will favour all the posts about it if you like or comment on the topic.
Businesses will have to drop the evergreen content for current and controversial content. Is this good? Not really, because this turns Facebook into an interactive tabloid platform.
DBJ Editorial
Business pages’ reach goes down
All this will affect the business pages that are all time low anyway – 5% to 2% for small followings.
“As we make these updates, Pages may see their reach, video watch time and referral traffic decrease. The impact will vary from Page to Page, driven by factors including the type of content they produce and how people interact with it. Pages making posts that people generally don’t react to or comment on could see the biggest decreases in distribution. Pages whose posts prompt conversations between friends will see less of an effect.”
Avoid the all of those words “like if…” and “share if you are…” in your posts because they might be caught in the AI censorship.
DBJ Editorial
What about the freedom of speech?
This does not mean the censorship teams at Facebook will be sacked. It just means that they will not ban the conservative voices ads on the platform. We believe they will continue to censor the speech but in a not so obvious manner like ‘reports feature’ and ‘page suspending’. These will be under the bias control of the censors and these will continue.
‘Freedom of speech’ means freedom of sales for Zuckerberg and this trumps the pc convictions… for now.
