It’s Not the Responsibility of Social Media to Fact-Check Information on Their Platforms

On election night, Twitter seemingly started a concerted effort to censor President Donald Trump, no matter what hour of the night. It’s part of a growing desire of social media companies to not only steer the national conversation, but to misconstrue or limit information that does not follow the progressive, liberal agenda.

The week before the election, Senators took the social media and tech companies, like Google, Facebook and Twitter, to task for censoring conservative viewpoints.

Kate Smith, a pro-abortion writer for CBS News, noted on Twitter, “Utah Senator Mike Lee just said that he considers fact-checking a form of censorship…Sen. Lee’s comment was made during today’s Senate hearing, held by the Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, where the chief executives of Google, Facebook and Twitter are testifying about their moderation practices.”

She implies that conservatives believe fact checking is somehow wrong. Generally, we don’t. But liberal businesses aren’t “fact checking” for the sake of truth but do it in order to discredit a certain viewpoint.

In recent years, fact checking has become a weapon of the leftists in these large media conglomerates to censor certain information. The moderators aren’t checking the facts objectively, but through the lens of a particular political perspective.

It’s about feeding Americans a certain agenda.

Besides liberals, no one is asking social media businesses to censor information or nonviolent fringe groups. Bans or censorship should only happen if the group is posting explicitly sexual, abusive or violent content. But no, instead of focusing on those type of deeply disturbing videos, Facebook is banning election related hashtags that support the president like #sharpiegate, #stopthesteal and has previously barred #bitcoin of all things.

It is not social media’s responsibility to “fact check” information or infringe on right-wing groups gathering to protest what they consider an unfair election process.

After all, the internet is full of inaccurate information. If social media companies want to take on the responsibility of policing the internet for every mistruth, good luck with that. If someone wants to believe a lie or misinformation, in the United States, that is their right.

It is understandable that social media companies remain concerned that someone who is mentally and/or emotionally unstable will use misinformation on their platform to commit a heinous act. This does happen, but it is not necessarily the responsibility of Facebook, Twitter or Google and there are laws that protect them.

Is Jodie Foster responsible for John Hinckley Jr.’s obsession that led to the attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan? No, of course not.

What certain left-leaning individuals want to do is create a police state within social media, that targets certain, right-leaning viewpoints that it disagrees with under the banner of protecting the broader public from what it considers misinformation.

It’s incredibly dangerous and allows social media and big tech companies to have an inordinate amount of control over the information we consume. That’s not right, and it damages the foundations of independence and freedom that this country was based on.

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