Open to Facebook
Facebook-funded Open fact checking pampers Facebook. The letter from Claudio Trezzano
Dear director,
I know I'm becoming nagging, but for a few hours now – to be precise, since I read this Open article – I have a question that's been nagging at me: why don't we also have a section here on Start Magazine dedicated to fact checking like Open , the newspaper written by very young journalists and founded and directed by slightly less young journalists such as, respectively, Enrico Mentana and Franco Bechis?
You don't know the service rendered to the reader with articles that dismantle the scams circulating online. And don't tell me that you have dedicated dozens of articles, insights, interviews andpodcasts on Start Magazine to fake news about the war in Ukraine first and then in Gaza. Because here I'm talking about things that are really of interest to the general public and that perhaps even end up deceiving them, like the chain letter shared by Facebook users "frightened – I read from Open – by the possibility that at a certain point Mark Zuckerberg's social network could start charging them $4.99 a month and using their photos, which I own and not Facebook.”
Here, while you put your journalists to work on the usual hackneyed economic, financial and geopolitical topics, in the Mentana newspaper light was shed on the reliability of the chain letter. And do you want to know what Open 's investigation revealed? Which, like all the other chains that have circulated in recent years on Facebook (and on WhatsApp payments, to remain in the Meta group) was completely false. In fact, I would say that all chain letters, regardless of subject matter, are. But it's always right to dedicate an article to it.
I know you're rolling your eyes eager to get back to your job. But I ask you for a little more patience because I have another question: why, in addition to us also doing fact checking, don't we also get financed by Facebook, always in the footsteps of Open ? Yes, don't you believe it? It's all written here , in what would once have been called a colophon.
Of course, it's curious that Open does fact checking on Facebook, in favor of Facebook, receiving money from Facebook, but I know you don't want to hear conspiracy theories, you don't even want to hear about conflict of interest and you always say that you have to stick to the facts because all the the rest is mere chatter; but come on, this time it's seriously a bit strange, don't you think?
What is certain is that if we persist in saying that the metaverse is a flop , that Meta (the holding company of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp…) is only advertising the potential of this indefinable technology in the hope of attracting the public and investors and even if Meta Quest 3 lies dusty on the shelves , Facebook will never give us a penny. And the real investigations, the real public service, are elsewhere, as demonstrated by the articles in Bechis and Mentana's newspaper.
Think about it, director.
Best wishes,
Claudio Trezzano
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/economia/open-to-facebook/ on Tue, 14 Nov 2023 19:30:06 +0000.