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Verified Video Shows Man Shot by Snipers During Protests in Iraq
On October 8, Steven Nabil, a journalist at the US-funded TV network Al Hurra News, shared a video on Twitter that showed a man waving a flag and then being shot on the street. He tagged it #Iraq suggesting that the video was taken during ongoing unrest in Iraq.
OP-ED: The Case For Government Regulation (and Against Mark Zuckerberg)
“I don’t believe that not fact-checking political ads is pro-conservative.” It’s with this awkward double negative that Mark Zuckerberg justified Facebook’s refusal to fact-check blatantly misleading political advertisements.
Zuckerberg spoke at Georgetown University this week, arguing that allowing Trump’s false ads to run on Facebook was fundamental to free speech. His position is reminiscent of English philosopher John Stuart Mill’s “marketplace of ideas”—if everyone is allowed to say whatever they want, good ideas will eventually drown out the bad. Except in Mill’s day, speech was not distributed on social media platforms with global reach, with AI algorithms choosing which content to display, and how often.
In an era of coordinated misinformation campaigns, private companies can no longer remain the sole gatekeepers of the digital marketplace, especially when their laissez-faire approach breeds lies and foreign intervention. It is time for governments to more proactively regulate Internet content in order to preserve the functioning of democracies.
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