Facebook sent a ton of traffic to a Chicago Tribune story. So why is everyone mad at them?
Because that story was a hit among anti-vaxxers — showing you don't have to be a "fake news" outfit to put public health at risk.
Hasnain says:
“True, that 54 million Facebook users saw the story is only the latest proof of something we’ve known about the platform for a long time: If you drop poison into Facebook’s content well, it can be extraordinarily effective at spreading it out. That’s a terrible and important reality.
But it’s also true that it only matters if the poison gets dropped in the first place.
There’s no way for mainstream news organizations to keep all the poison out of social media, of course. But is it too much to ask for news outlets to refrain from dropping it in ourselves? Or at least to be a little reflective when it turns out we were the ones doing the poisoning?”
Posted on 2021-08-25T05:47:29+0000