Facebook And Trump Agree — Social Media Users Are Journalists

The Daily Trump
by Staff
8/26/2018

Excerpt:

At his recent rally in West Virginia, President Trump likened ordinary social media users to journalists, arguing that freedom of speech for the latter should mean freedom of speech for the former. Facebook seems to agree — except about the freedom of speech part.

Facebook recently revealed that it ranks the “trustworthiness” of regular people, just as it ranks the trustworthiness of news sources. Every Facebook user is assigned a “trustworthiness score” between one and zero, which drops if the social network believes users are contributing to “misinformation” on the platform.

This is an implicit acknowledgment of what was once acknowledged to be a core fact of the modern era — that in an age where members of the public have access to video recording, powerful cameras, and a global audience via the internet, anyone can be a journalist. All of the essential requirements for reporting the news are built into your smartphone.

Before they realized that right-wingers can use the internet too, the new era of citizen journalism was once celebrated by the mainstream media, who even attempted to co-opt the new trend. “36 stories that prove citizen journalism matters” is a headline from none other than CNN, for a 2013 story hyping its iReport project, which encourages ordinary citizens to submit stories and news reports online. New York Times editors, in 2012, spoke of a “golden age of storytelling” unlocked by the web, and encouraged journalists to look to Twitter for emerging stories. The far-left Guardian newspaper, in 2013, created a system to turn “user-generated content” into news.

You won’t find these old-media behemoths touting the value of citizen journalism today. They fear that the conservative citizen journalists who they once mocked as “pajamas media” (a term later embraced by conservative bloggers) have grown too powerful, as evidenced by the 2016 election. Now, the old media is frantically pressuring Facebook to restore their gatekeeping power and protect them from online upstarts.

But President Trump hasn’t forgotten.

“Every one of us is sort of like a newspaper, you have Twitter… Facebook … you can’t have censorship.”

“I’d rather have fake news like CNN than have anybody – including liberals, socialists … than have anybody stopped and censored.”

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