| Today in the NYT Daily podcast, the NYT argued that: """
[Facebook] thinks about free speech the way the US govt. thinks about free speech. There is no rule that that has to be the case... A way of avoiding the choice [about who to censor] altogether is to say free speech is protected in the public sphere so we are going to protect it in the private sphere... We speak about facebook as if it is a democracy, something that has to have a consistent set of values that it applies equally... and there is some principle of fairness and equality that it must apply... facebook is acting as if it is constrained by these American notions... In countries like Germany there are strict hate speech laws. Facebook could be more like Germany... We are asking Zuckerburg to accept the power he has and use it wisely, and he is reluctant to do that... Zuckerburg has to solve this problem that he has created, and if he cant solve it or isn't willing to solve it, maybe he shouldn't have all this power.
"""[1] The NYT is criticizing facebook for having fair and egalitarian values, and all but calling for regulation if facebook doesn't censor views the NYT doesn't like. The NYT has a HUGE conflict of interest when it comes to facebook. It also has a doubly huge interest in regulating speech, if they can get the government to force companies to de-list NYT's competitors under the guise of fake news that is a huge win for them. Nowhere was that disclosed in this podcast. Under your criteria, that makes this fake news. Should facebook remove links to this podcast now? [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/20/podcasts/the-daily/facebo... |
Full disclaimer: I subscribe to the NYT. The paper+online editions. But any newspaper has different sections: dry reporting, rushed breaking news, in-depth analyses, op-ed commentaries, etc. The style of each is different. More importantly, the purpose of each type of article is different.
A lot of us got used to only reading newspaper articles via google or via our social media feed—appearing between a cat video and a political meme. After a while we start to all consider them the same. Context is lost. To me that is the greatest harm of social media. We strive for efficient use of our time but in the process we lost the context of what we're reading.
That's why I'm ok with paying a paper to compile and organize the information for me. Do I agree with every article the NYT puts out? Nope. Do I get irritated at articles written from particular biases? Yes, it happens. But overall the info is of quality and organized in such a way as to be the most efficient use of my time.
As a side-note I picked the NYT because I happen to like their in-depth data visualization group (another disclosure: I happen to like d3.js and its creator used to work there). But there are plenty of other quality papers out there who also do original journalistic work.