Once again, Mark Zuckerberg gets it badly wrong

Mark Zuckerberg’s umpteenth mistake has not cost him his life, and instead he is simply the victim to a satirical campaign on Facebook that includes messages accusing him of all kinds of things, including being a child molester or liking black jellybeans, as part of a campaign to challenge his view that social media should not fact check or become “arbiters of truth”.

Zuckerberg’s most obvious mistake in the latest Donald Trump imbroglio is telling others not to do something he’s been doing for years: Facebook not only employs fact-checkers , but has just appointed a kind of supreme court to make decisions in that regard. So using the media to hit out at Twitter, which rather than censoring Donald Trump, instead added a verification link to a presidential tweet, a decision it should have long taken long ago, and did so in a very polite way, given the man’s “merits” (what Twitter should do is close his account) is a colossal mistake.

What is Zuckerberg really saying? Facebook censors whoever and whatever it likes, whether it’s nipples or for any number of reasons, but it won’t censor anything its best customer chooses to post. Other people are censored, but Trump, on the other hand, gets a reassuring phone call.

Zuckerberg’s posturing while refusing to withdraw a Trump update openly inciting violence by using a…