Policing social media to today’s society

Anyone who follows my weekly column knows I have an affinity for the various TV series produced by HBO. Deadwood, The Sopranos, Entourage; all fantastic fun shows to watch. Another favorite would be Rome, the telling of the rise and fall of Julius Caesar. Of course it’s the secondary characters on Rome who are the most interesting, Lucius Vorenus and Titus Pullo being two. One of the best things about Rome though is the writing. In one episode one of Caesar’s chief rivals was murdered in what looked like a common street robbery. People suspected Caesar may have been secretly behind the killing and when was asked about the man’s death. Caesar said, “I didn’t know the man existed until he didn’t.” That kind of writing is just delicious.

I thought of that clever turn of phrase recently when a man named Alex Jones was apparently banned from much of social media. Pages like Facebook, YouTube and Spotify all gave him the old heaveho. I guess you could say I never heard of Alex Jones until he didn’t exist as it were. Or more accurately I’d never heard of him until Megyn Kelly got in trouble for doing a story on him some months back. I watched about two minutes of her profile on him until I heard he didn’t believe the Sandy Hook school shootings really happened and then I said out loud to myself, “Nutjob” and turned the channel.

I’ve always thought there were two truths about America. Being a free country people are allowed to say what they think and you are free to listen or change the channel. From the little I know or have read about Alex Jones he sounds nuttier than a fruit cake on Christmas Eve but I’m not certain we should applaud him being banned from social media. I understand the arguments in favor of this kind of censorship, he’s a jerk, he’s upsetting people and he spreads lies. I hear you. Just understand that is often the price for a free society with free speech.

What concerns me, beyond this Jones character being silenced, is who exactly is in charge of deciding what is OK to be on YouTube and what’s not? What are their personal beliefs and how is that shading their decision making process when it comes to who stays and who goes? Let’s say next week you post a video on that site or Facebook and someone doesn’t like it. They file a complaint and then a nameless, faceless person working for the social media site sends you a message saying, “We pulled your video because it violates our standards.” What standards? Whose standards?

Don’t misunderstand me on this. Free speech has limits. We all know you can’t yell “fire” in a crowded theater causing panic. If someone posts something calling for violence against anyone or shows people how to bring about violence in some way, I’m all for those messages and videos being banned. But speech, however misguided, should be protected.

There’s an old saying in journalism, the only way we can know the NY Times is free to do its job is if we allow the National Enquirer to do their job. We aren’t going to like everything we see, read or hear but that’s why God gave us thumbs to click the delete button and move on.

Since I’m on the topic of social media can I make a public appeal to the people running Facebook? Can you guys and gals please just leave the page alone? Stop making changes and trying to help me see who you think I should see. I’m not talking politics either, I mean the friends of mine on my page whom I never, ever see or hear from.

When I first got on Facebook about 8 years ago I had a certain group of family and friends on my page. If any one of them posted something, even something dumb like a picture of their tuna sandwich, I saw it. Now of the 600 people on my page I only see the posts of about 20 of them. I’ve been told it is because I haven’t interacted with the other 580 friends in a long time so the algorithm on Facebook thinks I don’t care about them. Not true. If my cousin, whom I haven’t spoken to in five years, has a baby I’d like to know about it.

Oh and an interesting aside. I have nearly 100,000 people on my professional Facebook page and the number one complaint I hear from my followers is that they never see my posts anymore unless they seek me out. At the same time Facebook keeps offering me a chance to have my posts seen by more people if I agree to give them a fist full of money. Coincidence? I’m sure.

A final note. If you do follow someone’s professional page on Facebook and want to see more of it just click the “following” button and the drop down menu gives you the option to “see first.” Click that and you bypass Facebook’s clever algorithm and see who you deem important, not Mark Zuckerberg.

I mean, it is your page.