Saturday, February 05, 2011

Journalistic transparency alert: PolitiFact @ FaceBook

Not long after I finished praising PolitiFact for its willingness to entertain contrary views, I've been given reason to revisit the issue.

One does not necessarily obtain the same view of FaceBook when one is logged in as one does when one is logged out.

Here's a logged in view of a recent thread:


Four replies to the thread.  I do not lightly explain the obvious.

Logged out:

Reece Martin's comments do not appear, at least on my computer, when I am not logged in at FaceBook.  I've discovered that select comments of mine do not appear (on my computer) when I'm not logged in.

Curiouser and curiouser ... Reece Martin's comments do not appear in Google results searching the facebook.com domain.  We only get mentions of her name when she happens to be listed as liking something.

I suppose privacy settings might explain the search results for Ms. Martin.  They do not explain why some of my posts appear under certain conditions and some do not.

If the problem isn't wonkiness (admittedly not at all a settled question), then shouldn't PolitiFact offer some sort of explanation for its system of comment moderation?

No comments:

Post a Comment

Please remain on topic and keep coarse language to an absolute minimum. Comments in a language other than English will be assumed off topic.