I recently shared a meme on Facebook simply because it made me laugh. It was a photograph that purported to be of workers building the Egyptian pyramids. There has been a lot of speculation over many years as to how the ancient Egyptians completed these colossal structures, and some wit decided to answer the question with a clearly invented picture that was just as clearly intended to be a joke, but it was one that Facebook did not get. After sharing the said post I received a warning from Facebook that it would be limited as ‘independent fact checkers’ had decided it ‘lacked context’!

As usual with Facebook, the actual context that their fact checkers decided was lacking is never identified; that is quite convenient. It is easier to defend an objection that is vague than one that is clear. Of course, if you accept that the image is fake and that the entire post is a joke then you have all the context required to make sense of it; humorously. It would appear that Facebook does not have a sense of humour, however, or perhaps they lack the intelligence to know when something is satirical.

Facebook issued a similar warning about the photograph below.

Their so-called independent fact checkers were worried that people might be misled by the image as it appeared to have been edited. I just thought that it was beautiful. Someone had mentioned in the comments section of the original post that they also thought that the photographed had been enhanced to create the halo-effect, which suggests to me that people are intelligent enough to work these things out for themselves and do not require the Facebook nanny police.

Just prior to my sharing the above images my Facebook feed was awash with click-bait adverts that all featured clearly altered photographs that appeared to show certain celebrities being arrested in public; none of these posts appear to warrant submission to Facebook’s fact checkers despite being obviously misleading, however. Perhaps that is because they people who posted them had paid for that privilege, which seems to be something of a double standard in that Facebook only concerns itself about the truth when there is no money involved.