Facebook is a huge courtyard where its users live deceived: they thought that everything that happened there remained. That they could tell their adventures far from the eyes of others. That they were protected. What a paradox; That virtual building that promised to improve their personal relationships has ended up mistreating reality. As he became the monster he is now, with more than 2.5 billion people registered, he was filled with more known people, who were pledged by his immense possibilities to connect with his followers.
The mask has fallen and many intellectuals have begun to question whether it compensates them to continue navigating this sea of misinformation. The world’s leading social network has just lost one of its most egregious members, the American writer Stephen King. Tired and fed up with the false information that circulates without limits, the 72-year-old intellectual has definitely decided to exile himself and cover the window, leaving more than 5 million followers orphaned.
The cause: it could not take it anymore, so it joins the withdrawal of other thinking heads that in recent times have frozen their profiles on social platforms because they are considered toxic. “I don’t feel comfortable with the avalanche of false information that is allowed in your political publicity, nor do I trust your ability to protect the privacy of your users,” he said in a statement.
A brave decision that coincides with the list that live Facebook and other technology companies in their attempts to combat the bulos in their services. The company founded by Mark Zuckerberg has been left alone. It is the only one that will accept lies in its online advertising. In a year in which I will live an important electoral meeting in the United States, the social network has refused to go through its information review program political publications unlike other services such as Twitter that decided not to accept this type of content although resent your finances.
This enlistment of Zuckerberg can only be understood in economic terms: the blow to his income would be brutal even if he wanted to “sell” it as a defense of freedom of expression. But critical voices have begun to emerge that call for a change for the sake of democracy. The obstacle Facebook faces is that if it accepts that it deals with informative content, it should adjust to another type of regulation, perhaps less favorable in some markets to its buoyant economy. But, on the other hand, if you look at the line, it is possible that what is feared will happen again; that someone malicious tries to intercede between users with the propagation of advertisements that, in many cases, contain false data. .