Tin-eared social media giant Facebook Inc demonstrates once again that it is part of the problem and not part of the solution, as it promotes toxic gun culture at the recent Conservative Political Action Conference and fails to come to grips with its part in spreading conspiracy theories and "fake news".
Facebook
has pulled a demo of Oculus Rift's VR
shooter Bullet Train from the Conservative Political Action
Conference in Maryland amid concerns over gun violence, Variety reported
earlier.
It
doesn't appear to have been Bullet Train's violent content that
prompted the withdrawal per se, but rather that CPAC draws lots of gun rights
advocates right at the same time those same National Rifle Association types
are drawing a massive wave of criticism in the wake of another
school massacre in Parkland, Florida this month.
A
number of companies have cut ties with the NRA, like software firm Symantec,
which decided
to pull discounts for the pro-gun group's members this week. A
running New
York Times tally of others to do so includes banks, airlines,
automotive rentals and services, insurance companies, and a home security
company.
As
the Times noted on
Friday, boycott campaigns tend to fade over time but this time the pressure has
built quickly, buoyed by a number of Parkland survivors speaking out on social
media and leaving some corporations with no middle ground to recede to.
Facebook is at CPAC and they have a VR shooting game pic.twitter.com/wmV23jezpN— Sean Morrow (@snmrrw) February 23, 2018
A demo clip
of Bullet Train hosted on the Oculus Rift website shows that at
least one level in the game involves the player fighting through waves of
"resistance forces" in a fairly generic rail station setting. It does
not appear to be particularly bloody, though video of CPAC attendees using the
game's motion-tracking controls in a vague pantomime of actual shooting
probably did not help, either.
In
a statement to Variety, Facebook virtual reality VP Hugo Barra said:
There
is a standard set of experiences included in the Oculus demos we feature at
public events. A few of the action games can include violence. In light of the
recent events in Florida and out of respect for the victims and their families,
we have removed them from this demo. We regret that we failed to do so in the
first place.
Yet
the optics of the Oculus Rift demo are probably not the most important issue
Facebook should be worried about right now.
Facebook
itself has also come under fire for the rapid spread of conspiracy theories
about the Parkland shooting, which as
CNN noted migrate from internet underbellies like 4chan onto
mainstream social media sites via "conservative pages, alt-right
personalities, nationalist blogs and far-right pundits." Posts on Facebook
promoting the idiotic smear that survivors speaking out against guns were
"crisis actors," i.e. some hazily defined variety of professional
propagandists paid off to promote gun control, went far and wide; the social media
giant repeatedly declined to discuss how it was enforcing violations of its
community guidelines against offenders when asked by CNN.
Per
the New
York Times, it is still really, really easy to find hundreds of posts
claiming the shooting was part of a "deep state" black flag operation
or the like using Facebook's built-in search option, which kind of calls into
question the company's sincerity:
On
Facebook and Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, searches for the hashtag
#crisisactor, which accused the Parkland survivors of being actors, turned up
hundreds of posts perpetuating the falsehood (though some also criticised the
conspiracy theory). Many of the posts had been tweaked ever so slightly -- for
example, videos had been renamed #propaganda rather than #hoax -- to evade
automated detection.
The
spread of the theories on Facebook has also caused some in the tech media to
question whether the long-maligned and ill-defined "trending"
metric should be retired. Users who post conspiracy theories often
rabidly engage with others promoting similar ideas, which in numerous instances
means the posts are promoted right to the top of Facebook and other sites like
YouTube.
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