As Twitchy reported last week, Facebook had announced the 20 members of its new oversight board who would “make final and binding decisions on whether specific content should be allowed or removed from Facebook and Instagram.” Mark Dice did a little digging and found a lot of anti-Trump messages from board members, not to mention one of them was law professor Pamela Karan, who testified during the impeachment hearings and made that awful “joke” about the president’s son, Barron.
Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan has a piece out Thursday arguing that Facebook needs some “serious regulation,” not some high-priced oversight board. Why? First off, she seems upset because “conventional wisdom now holds that without Facebook’s help spreading misinformation, Trump probably would not be in office.” OK. Second, because she claims Facebook has a huge truth problem.
Facebook has a huge truth problem. A high-priced ‘oversight board’ won’t fix it. … My column https://t.co/Q4eFPl9B32
— Margaret Sullivan (@Sulliview) May 14, 2020
Jeryl Bier did some investigating and found that the Washington Post — gasp! — has a truth problem of its own:
1/ Here, @Sulliview writes in the @washingtonpost that Facebook should do a better job of policing billions of posts on its site for lies and fake news. https://t.co/NJ8wdmAIMu
— jerylbier (@JerylBier) May 14, 2020
2/ How easy would that be? Well, ask @washingtonpost. In October 2017, I wrote an op-ed for the @WSJ about the Southern Poverty Law Center using a hate crime hoax as the lead anecdote in its annual report.https://t.co/o3nKMBJHe5
— jerylbier (@JerylBier) May 14, 2020
3/ To its credit, the SPLC immediately corrected and even reissued the annual report with a footnote about the hoax. However, to this day, the @washingtonpost hosts the original, uncorrected SPLC annual report on its site, hoax and all.https://t.co/Axu80b6Zf5 pic.twitter.com/gqnFmBtYaa
— jerylbier (@JerylBier) May 14, 2020
4/ Perhaps @Sulliview could alert someone at @washingtonpost about this, because my efforts have been for naught.
/Endhttps://t.co/hpjYhyjhRo— jerylbier (@JerylBier) May 14, 2020
One more thing… here's a link to the corrected SPLC report on the SPLC's website:https://t.co/N0i0Foj7Be pic.twitter.com/6nuMe2wXax
— jerylbier (@JerylBier) May 14, 2020
We don’t trust the SPLC in the first place, but apparently the Washington Post does, even after the SPLC admits it was taken in by fake news.
Related:
Mark Dice takes a closer look at some of the people on Facebook’s new oversight board (and their tweets) https://t.co/ki4aehrqeY
— Twitchy Team (@TwitchyTeam) May 6, 2020
