The Facebook Disclaimer Scam

If you’re a Facebook user you will, from time to time, notice a slew of identical content being shared around and commented upon. A lot of it relates to the platform itself, perhaps a change to its Privacy policy or the fact that Facebook is going to charge to use. That one is a perennial favourite and no matter how many times it appears it never fails to win numerous shares and encourage outraged comments.

It would appear that there are a larger number of Facebook users who are happy to take everything they see on the site at face value, irrespective of how many scams, fake posts and downright lies are created and posted. When another one comes along, they get red in the face, step up onto the high horse and extol their ire in no uncertain terms.

Which is why a number of posts in recent days sporting the same disclaimer caught my attention. I love a good disclaimer, they are great fun as I wrote in my blog “Disclaiming the Disclaimer”. Some are creative, some are not, all are utterly useless.

Here’s the latest one

On the one hand it gives the impression that Facebook is sharing our content and pictures with gay abandon when in fact it’s merely the notice board on which the notices are pinned. It’s not Facebook you want to worry about sharing that photo of you doing that thing with the inflatable banana and the marshmallows. That’ll be other people, they’re the ones you want to be concerned about.

On the other it forgets that if you were to post an offensive comment it won’t Detective Inspector Facebook who feels your collar it’ll be the local Rozzers.

In short, someone’s made it up for a lark and as always, the Facebook herd has followed as obediently as always with each share leading to another and so on.

Facebook has never claimed to own your content and how public it is depends on your own Privacy settings. It’s yet another example of users needing to be responsible for their own platforms and not lay the blame at the door of a specific channel when it goes a bit wrong.

Disclaiming the Disclaimer

You’ve probably seen hundreds of them; you may even have one of our own on your Twitter bio.

Yes it’s the disclaimer; the one above is what’s opted for in many cases, however sometimes users get a bit creative.

After all these years there is still a general belief that these disclaimers in a Twitter profile somehow bestow a suit of armour if a problem arises with any dubious content issued from that person’s account.

It doesn’t matter how they phrased, a Twitter disclaimer is about as much use as an underwater hairdryer.

I don’t know where or when the disclaimer was born but like anything that gets repeated over and over again, the perception becomes reality.

To give it a legal comparison it’s like the word “allegedly” which is still thought of as a shield if used before a libellous or defamatory comment. Again, this is a popular misconception but still widely believed.

The main man in legal training for radio folk is Paul Chantler, he says this about that word

“For example, despite what you may have been led to believe by ‘Have I Got News For You?, the word “allegedly” is not a defence against a possible libel action; if anything it just digs you even deeper into the hole in which you’ve dug yourself. In libel cases, the burden of proof is on the defendant, so by using “allegedly”, you are, in effect, admitting you are not totally sure of the facts, and, therefore, have no adequate defence”.

The same thing applies to the Twitter disclaimer.

We shouldn’t need a form of words on our bio to protect us from our own ideas and thoughts being published on a public forum. All we need is to take responsibility for our opinions for that is what they are; they cannot be anyone else’s.

You will occasionally see another disclaimer on a Twitter profile which declares that :-

“Re-tweets are not endorsements”

My argument is that that is EXACTLY what they are. What else could they be, unless you add a caveat to the tweet you are sharing you can expect the content to be taken as something you not only agree with, but agree with enough to share with your own Twitter community.

Here’s a story that grabbed my attention in the last couple of days featuring a tweet from Geoffrey Miller, a Psychologist at the University of New Mexico.

He declared via Twitter :-

A rumpus quickly ensued as you would expect and with every justification, as unless he’s done research into both the correlation of willpower relating to the intake of carbohydrates and the impetus to complete a dissertation, he’s on shaky ground. Love the hashtag too, as if that’s enough proof to justify the preceding comments.

He soon responded to the criticism he was getting by explaining it was all part of a research program to gauge Twitter reaction to provocative comments. I suppose we should give him credit for trying to come up with something more creative than “I had my account hacked”, but once he realised we weren’t all born yesterday, he issued a disclaimer AGAINST HIS OWN OPINION.

It’s another example of the way an ill-judged, bone-headed Social Media posting can not only come back and bite you in the backside, but not be happy until it’s eaten your trousers too.

The way to avoid these embarrassing episodes is not to indulge in meaningless copy and paste disclaimers but to be measured, thoughtful and considered.

A tweet can take seconds to share but the impact and damage of a poorly judged post can stay with you for a lifetime.