Sadly, you can post almost anything on social media these days

We received an unexpected surprise Sunday evening – a letter to the editor from a person expressing on an opinion she feels is important.

These days, letters to the editor, especially the ones you don’t expect, are worth their weight in gold. It’s on the right side of the page, below the political cartoon. At a time where anybody can post anything they want, fact or fiction disguised as fact, an honest-to-goodness letter to the editor is delightful.

These days, social media is a cesspool of misinformation and attacks. Meta, as Facebook’s parent company, will now allow people to post almost anything they want under the guise of it being fact. It’s up to you as the reader to figure out if what you are reading is within the neighborhood of being true. These days, that’s pretty scary.

Meta points to the government and so-called legacy media claiming it censored people’s point of view. Many of us don’t agree with Joe Wollin’s concerns about the Flock cameras the city plans to install. But we’re not going to censor what he has to say because his opinion is based in fact as far as we can tell. There’s a difference between censorship and allowing people to present statements as factual when they are no more factual than say the temperature yesterday was 80 degrees in New Prague.

It’s bad enough Meta allows businesses to promote themselves on Facebook without cost. Small newspapers around the country can’t give away valuable advertising space as Facebook does. The residents of Shakopee, Jordan, Savage, Prior Lake, Eden Prairie, Belle Plaine, Chanhassen, Chaska and elsewhere miss their community newspapers. But without enough revenue from advertising, they couldn’t survive. It’s a gut punch when people in Belle Plaine, for example, rely on Facebook for news from their city council or school board.

Facebook rarely provides the details of why a proposal is worth considering and it won’t ask a city councilor or school board director to explain a vote. Facebook won’t be at the high school basketball game and ask a coach about how the athletes are performing. Facebook doesn’t care about the school play or how residents feel about the reasons why the city decides to remove mature silver maples along boulevards.

There’s a Facebook page out of Lonsdale – Lonsdale MN Happenings – where members can post opinions and requests anonymously for fear of being judged. You want to express an opinion on our pages, sorry, you have to own it.

When we get a letter to the editor, we feel a responsibility to try and check the accuracy of statements and when deciding whether to ask the author to change the letter or at the least submit the source of their claim. If necessary, we’ll err on giving the writer the opportunity to express their point of view, whether we agree with it or not.

We’d rather be a source of information and opinion you can trust without having to second-guess. When we write about an issue the city council, school board or county board discussed, you can count on us being at the meeting or watching a rerun of it and drawing information from the source of the information with attribution.

And before you note we post things on Facebook, the stories and news items we post online have almost always been in the print edition and have been generated locally. We welcome your submissions. The New Prague Times has been published locally for many years. We hope to be around for many years to come.