The social media advertising giants of the web have great power. When they admit this, they will come under pressure
The decision by Facebook to ban six prominent figures of the alt-right movement, along with Louis Farrakhan, from both Facebook and its subsidiary Instagram, is a significant development in the struggle against online extremism. It is also a step on to a wobbly moral tightrope where decisions about censorship are made for the whole world by a few giant American advertising companies.
This is not an entirely satisfactory position, but it appears to be the least bad available at the moment. Global social media networks are neither traditional publishers, who can reasonably be held responsible for everything that appears on them, nor wholly neutral carriers, like the telephone companies. Their interests are not entirely aligned with society’s, nor with their individual users’. In particular, the social networks want users to spend as much time as possible with them, so that profiles of their interests and desires can be constructed and sold on to advertisers.
Continue reading...from The Guardian http://bit.ly/2DPCVuP
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