Internet or Irresponsible? – Jontae Zapata

“Who Will Take Responsibility for Facebook?” by Virginia Hefferman, “Taking the You out of Youtube” by Henry Jenkins, and “The Truth About Facebook’s Fake Quest to Connect the World” by Noam Cohen all present a similar trending topic: who is to be held accountable for the people on the internet? Hefferman stated “Nothing about Facebook is intrinsically organized or self-regulating.” In other words, Facebook is an open platform with no real boundaries set in place by administrative powers. This is considered to be dangerous and quite irresponsible of Mark Zuckerberg due to his inability to limit the amount of hate speech and “fake news” that circulates his platform. Hefferman even went as far to compare this lack of accountability in Facebook with the tragedy of 9/11 and the failures in the infrastructure of the Twin Towers. Furthermore, Henry Jenkins appeared to share a similar viewpoint when it comes to YouTube. After Google’s takeover of the online community, YouTube was no longer an intimate experience between creators and users but another large corporation owned platform where all users aren’t truly heard. Although, Jenkins does the see the bright side of YouTube in that it is a place where a sort of online culture diffusion can occur and people of varying backgrounds can come together and form new technologies, concepts, strategies, etc. However, similar to Facebook’s crisis of fake news and hate speech, people in the higher rankings of YouTube are not held accountable for their free usage of people’s intellectual property that is uploaded to the network. While technically, YouTube is an open platform – it is also a community based platform in which video makers are the reason the site is a viable network. Jenkins asks “So, why are these same companies now taking their audience’s intellectual property for free?” The large corporations under Google are capable of exploiting users and have to answer to no one. Lastly, Noam Cohen wrote about the “cultist” behavior of Facebook. To paraphrase, Cohen talks about how Facebook claims to be about connecting people and that these connections inherently make Facebook a good thing – however, in reality Facebook’s only concern is obtaining new users through the premise of if everyone uses the site then the next person should as well. According to the article, Zuckerberg made claims that Facebook will increase people’s empathy and cause them to share more connections than ever humanly possible. Essentially, Cohen appears to be most related to a conspiracy theorist out of the three authors presented. Overall, these articles appear to be asking questions about who is to be held responsible for the downfall of ethics in these large scale online communities. Nefferman and Cohen wish to blame Zuckerberg for Facebook’s rather crude and dishonest nature while Henry Jenkins is more on the lines of asking what classifies an effectively diverse and fair online forum and/or network. It is quite fair to say that they all hold at least a sense of validity in that one must question the efficacy of these open online websites meant to connect people and spread helpful information all the while maintaining a safe and healthy space for growth and communication. Nonetheless, the blame of Zuckerberg is questionable as the hate that the people refer to that is found on Facebook is posted by individuals who have hateful ideals but supported by people with similar ideals, not those with unhealthy mindsets who happen to be converted by falsified information. Zuckerberg may not have to be held accounted for the millions of users on Facebook because all he did was open a forum for people to share their thoughts. In YouTube’s case, Google as a larger corporation may not be able to control the way in which people participate on its platform but should be capable of supplying the correct value to content creators due to their large contributions to the network. They provide a service to the online community and the corporations who run YouTube and should be compensated as such.

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