Another week and another Facebook drama! And once again it is reinforcing the fact that fake news is spam. We get too tripped up in the editorial aspect of the problem when it is a technology problem. For the past four years, I have been repeating this ad nausea. So I am glad to see that others are finally waking up to that reality. The sad part is that like the commentators, the companies too react to these issues, instead of being proactive in solving the problem.
That is why we have problems with Facebook and its inability to control the madness. Crank calls and robocalls were spam of the phone era. The email had its spam. Text messages also became spam. Why are we surprised that social media posts became spam — in most cases as fake news. Tomorrow it will be video and virtual reality spam.
At the end of the day, we have to remember: spam is an unsolicited or undesired electronic message. The network and the tools of delivery don’t matter. Facebook doesn’t do the job of protecting the platform from spam. Just as it failed on fake news, it will fail on video spam and VR spam. We shouldn’t be surprised.
