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It's Not Mark Zuckerberg's Responsibility to Fix All of Facebook

Mark Zuckerberg has recently made it a personal goal to "fix" Facebook.
There are a few problems with Facebook that need to be solved. Cyberbullying and online abuse are never acceptable under any circumstances. I wish Facebook weren't such a time-waster just as much as you do. And reposting news that falsifies facts while pretending to be legitimate news is another problem that needs to be fixed.

But I don't think it's Mark Zuckerberg's job to fix all of Facebook's problems.
Some of those problems are your job to fix and my job to fix.

If there is clickbait on Facebook, it isn't Mark Zuckerberg's responsibility to prevent it from being spread. You and I should stop spreading it.
If there is fake news on Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg shouldn't need to prevent it from being spread. You and I should stop spreading it.

Do you realize how easy it is to fact-check some information?
Every once in a while, a picture will come up with about 16 posters for movies that are supposedly coming out "next year". The last time I saw it, I fact-checked each of them with approximately 2-5 clicks each:

  1. I searched the name of the movie to see if the movie had even been announced, focusing on trustworthy sources like Variety, TheHollywoodReporter, and Deadline.
  2. If the movie had been announced, I checked the release year to make sure it was coming out "next year" (one of them had been released 3 years earlier).
  3. If the movie was legitimate, I checked if the poster was legitimate by hitting "images".

Basically any movie news can be fact-checked that simply.

If movie news can be checked that easily, it shouldn't take more than 10 minutes to fact-check something.
But what if you don't have 10 minutes to fact check something? Then why would you share it? Just because something agrees with your views does not mean its facts are completely accurate. Something in it might be inaccurate, and there will probably be something else that agrees with your views that has more accurate facts.

Obviously, cyber-bullying, online abuse, and time-wasting are more complex problems. So let's fix the problems you and I can fix until we know how to fix the other problems.
After all, there are over 2,000,000,000 users on Facebook (as of Jan 1, 2018) and about 11,000 employees (as of June 30, 2015).* So I'd rather take responsibility for my own sharing and encourage others to do the same than make the employees of Facebook force Facebook to be the right way.

*source: https://www.omnicoreagency.com/facebook-statistics/
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