Greg's Corner

Why The Onion taking on Facebook is real news

If you’re not familiar with The Onion, it is a satirical news website that has been around since the dawn of the internet. To put it in simple terms, they are the internet version of Saturday Night Live’s Weekend Update. While The Onion’s humor can sometimes be crass and off-color, satire is sometimes the purest form of social commentary. So it should come as no surprise that The Onion has turned its satirical barbs at Facebook.

Recently, The Onion has been lambasting Facebook with such headlines as “Mark Zuckerberg Insists Anyone With Same Skewed Values And Unrelenting Thirst For Power Could Have Made Same Mistakes.” Then there’s “Daddy, I Don’t Want To Live In The World Your Website Has Created,” written from the perspective of Mark Zuckerberg’s 2-year-old daughter. The reason that The Onion has gone on this crusade against Facebook is that The Onion claims Facebook is limiting The Onion’s exposure on Facebook.

In a statement attributed to Editor-in-Chief Chad Nackers, the publication further skewered the social network, in its signature, humorous style.

“We are strong proponents of the First Amendment, and the fuel of a functioning democracy is the free flow of information. Facebook, the world’s largest sieve of personal data, has become an unwanted interloper between The Onion, and our audience. We have 6,572,949 followers on Facebook who receive an ever-decreasing amount of the content we publish on the network. Mark Zuckerberg has repeatedly betrayed the trust of billions of people. What you’ve seen over the last 48 hours is only the tip of the iceberg.”

While it can be argued that Facebook is limiting The Onion’s exposure due to Facebook’s initiative to fight ‘fake news’, this situation does highlight a much larger problem. Because of Facebook’s dominance of the internet, content creators, businesses and news outlets are all at the whim of Facebook, and if we don’t all play by Facebook’s arbitrary rules we could all see our favorite content go up in smoke. Should one solitary company be able to wield that much power? In case you’re wondering, the answer is no, no it shouldn’t.