weekly prompt 11
This election, as well as the controversy surrounding COVID-19 has caused some people to use social media to pass of their own opinions as fact. Because social media is not monitored as it goes out, after the post is made, the censorship and monitoring of the post have to happen. This also means that lots of people may be able to see misinformation before it is changed. I see it as the duty of the social media platform to prevent more people from seeing and believing the misinformation that is put out to them. This does not necessarily mean censoring the opinions of everyone on the social media site, just the ones that are passed off as fact. For example, President Donald Trump has been put on restriction many times by Twitter because he says things that are simply untrue. This is not just unique to social media, over the last week many new channels have taken action to turn away from the things that the president is saying and display the true facts rather than what the president has said is true. This should be true for the general public as well, but the president is someone that the American people as well as the people who look to America should trust. President Trump has the duty to lead, and leading with lies is dangerous.
I would give Twitter a B for their censorship ideas because it happens to larger platforms and people but not as much to the general public. The idea of going viral makes some ideas spread like wild fire and sometimes these ideas are stopped but often they are put out to the public and people tend to believe these untrue statements.
Instagram has done a good job of putting tags on things that are deemed untrue by fact checkers and putting tags onto posts that have to do with COVID-19 as well as posts that have to do with voting and the presidency. These posts with the tags often have a link to more information about what the post is saying. Similar to Twitter you can click through and see what the post says it just has a warning that the information in the post may be untrue or manipulated in someway. Instagram also deserves a B for their monitoring because there are flaws, but the system is working for the most part.
I personally have not use TikTok in a while, but I know that when I did, posts are often taken down for inappropriate content and I'm sure that sometimes it happens with lies as well. I have seen contact creators become very upset with the censorship of their content especially when it is put to the public to decide what needs to be taken down. TikTok often takes the reports from users at face value and just takes down the post right away but this doesn't necessarily mean that it should have been taken down in the first place. It would be hard for me to give a definitive grade to a site I don’t use.
Similar to TikTok, I am not a big Facebook user but I do know some of the controversy surrounding the site and the things that get posted and re-posted and eventually go viral on Facebook. Facebook is one of the older and more finally tuned social media sites so I feel that their distribution methods are censored differently than newer sites like TikTok. Facebook has also gone through lawsuits and other personal information protection issues, so some may see Facebook is hard to trust.
