Isms: Views on life in rural America

Dear Mark Zuckerberg:

How ironic your company axed its fact-checking program, aimed at stopping the proliferation of disinformation, earlier last week.

Imagine my surprise on Thursday, when this newspaper, a community weekly covering the Summerland region in Nebraska, had a post celebrating Orchard Fire and Rescue Department members honored for long-time service, removed from Facebook.

I linked the story from our paper’s website directly to your social media site, a procedure I’ve done multiple times without problems. Shortly after, I received a message from your company notifying me the post was removed because someone reported it as misinformation.

Who knew celebrating community members for being volunteers would be flagged as fake news? I did not see that on my 2025 Bingo card.

(And if the person who reported the post as misinformation is reading this, shame on you. It speaks volumes about your lack of character.)

The notification states, “Our technology found your content doesn’t follow our Community Standards. As a result, our technology took action. We use the same rules around the world for everyone. Our technology and teams work in many languages to make sure our rules are applied consistently.”

Mark, if your company would do its due diligence, you’d realize the post was factual information. In fact, after your company removed the post, I posted the picture and copied and pasted the text from the article into a new post. Guess what? It wasn’t removed.

Your company de-emphasizes news, whether its from a large legacy media outlet or a small-market weekly, yet you want people to flock to you to get news and push Facebook Page owners to follow your agenda: post this many times a week, add x number of reels a week, purchase two ads this week. Ads, which I add, rarely generate a ROI.

Basically, Mark, the time to break with you up may happen sooner than you think. While you want to control everyone’s metaverse, what they see and when they see it, you will not control ours and what our readers and followers are able to view.

In fact, during a one-minute scroll through my personal feed, I saw three scams pop up in area groups, one claiming a serial killer was going door to door in Columbus, while two (with different photos) claimed children were being beaten and at the local hospital, parents couldn’t be found. Theese are fake, but it is click bait, which you benefit from. Why does your organization fail to remove those posts for violation of Community Standards?

Fact checking would benefit your company and you, too.

That much is obvi.