Social media giants Facebook and Twitter have been skirting the law for years because they are not regulated in the same way as broadcasters.
And broadcasters have plenty to say about that, complaining to authorities and lobbying for the same rules of defamation to apply for these ‘platforms’ as to broadcasters. But there has been little progress… until now.
It took only one fact check alert from Twitter on a Donald Trump fake news post about postal voting fraud for Trump to threaten to remove their immunity in retaliation.
Satirising the situation The Chaser crew posted an article on their website this afternoon, which has continued to crash due to a huge response.
The article, “Social media should not fact check posts” says child molester Mark Zuckerberg, has so far received 8.8k shares and 9.7k likes on Facebook, and been retweeted 3.3k times.
“We’ve had 1.2 million people view the article on our website since 4am this morning,” said Charles Firth, managing editor of The Chaser. “At the moment, we’re serving over 8,000 people per minute. It turns out Facebook users love this type of content — so I guess we’ll just have to churn out more of it.”
“It’s gone viral across the globe” said Cam Smith, The Chaser’s editor. “But the problem seems to be local. It looks like the NBN can’t handle over three Australian users logging on at the same time.”
“It would deeply hypocritical if Facebook were to fact-check our post. So I suppose, according to their own principles, they should just let it spread far and wide. Checkmate, Facebook,” said Charles Firth.
You can click the picture to see the full article on the Chaser website… if you’re lucky, because it is currently overloaded with huge numbers of hits.
You may just get this message until the web traffic spike dies down.
Below is the facebook post with thousands of likes and shares, although if you can’t see it by the time you read this article that is probably because Facebook has censored it.
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