The truth is out there.

  By Gonzalo López Martí  – Creative director, etc. / lmmiami.com/

“Beware those who want to save the world,
most likely they just want to control it.”

• Mark Zuckerberg is under pressure to weed out fake news and fake ads from his platforms.
• He was grilled with gusto by members of Congress a few weeks back.
• His line of defense: Facebook retains a group of independent fact checkers who filter content uploaded by media outlets, advertisers and users.
• Freedom of speech notwithstanding, it sorta makes sense for a private company such as Facebook to try and stay clean of hate speech, pornography and other forms of inappropriate content.
• Where should the line be drawn though and by whom?
• What should we do, for instance, with pseudoscience enthusiasts such as flat Earthers?
• Should we censor their websites and ban their conventions?
• Everyone in their sane mind knows the Earth is round, right?
• Well, strictly speaking it is not a sphere: it is a “geoid”, a geometrical shape that kind of looks spherical but is flattened at the poles.
• From a rigorously scientific POV, claiming the world is round is arguably a false statement.
• Should Zuckerberg’s army of fact checkers crack down on me if I claimed so on some post or other?
• Would I be lying if I said the vaccines are a global conspiracy by the pharmaceutical industry?
• Is it a lie if a sufficient amount of voters &/or consumers believe it?
• The crusade against fakeness is a dangerous rabbit hole.
• Of course, politicians love it.
• They can’t get enough of it.
• It allows them to overact virtue and self-righteousness.
• It gives them fodder to cry wolf and hyperventilate on cable talk shows and social media.
• It justifies their existence and their salaries.
• The very chance of becoming the arbiters of what’s true and what’s fake makes your garden variety politician salivate like a St. Bernard in a steakhouse.
• Because, naturally, we the people are a bunch of gullible idiots who don’t know shit from Shinola.