Wednesday, May 17, 2017

Criticism of ARD/ZDF

For two years, I've been yanking on various German state-run or public TV news stories and funneling them off to my Facebook Schnitzel Republic page.....telling a few lines of the story, and attaching the link.   Out of a thousand stories....a thousand links....all successful.

In the past two weeks, it's an odd thing.

Any story which relates to anything of a right-wing nature (AfD, some immigration story, etc)....the story still appears to be there and linkable.  Then as you hit the submit button.....Facebook lets you know that the story is not there, and it can't be linked.  You can even go to your page and insert the URL, and it says the same thing.....it's not there.

This has happened at least 15 times over the past two weeks.

Intentionally designed so it can't be passed around?

I sat and tried to imagine this simply being a poor administrative act of a couple of folks.  The thing is....it only occurs with ZDF, ARD, HR and SWR.  Commercial or newspaper sites?  No issue.  Regular stories on ZDF or ARD with puppies, business, or crime?  No problem.

It does cut back on commentary or criticism....if the item doesn't exist.....you can't cite it.  But it's an odd behavior problem to start up with.  Why bother even reporting the item if viewers or readers can't cite it?

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