It is a social media company with close ties to the incoming Trump administration. It uses a “community notes” system to fight misinformation and allows hateful comments to fly the “freedom of speech” flag. He is settling in Texas. It’s run by a guy who’s worth hundreds of billions of dollars and has the fashion sense of someone a couple decades younger. No, we are not talking about X. It is Meta.
Soon it will be difficult to tell the difference. Meta will establish a new content regulation system and fact-checkingin favor of “community notes” of X; a comparison that Joel Kaplan, Meta’s global policy director, made directly in a blog post. Both CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Kaplan used the “free speech” justification to introduce alarmingly permissive changes to their “Hateful Conduct” policy. Last week, it named Dana White, a friend of Donald Trump and CEO of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, to its board of directors, and promoted Kaplan, a strong supporter in Republican circles.
Copy bad practices
“I’ve been waiting for years for Meta to eliminate this program. But not in this way and at this nakedly political moment,” suggests Alexios Matzarlis, director of the Safety, Trust and Safety Initiative at Cornell University and founding director of the International Fact -Checking Network, who helped establish the partnership between Facebook and the fact-checkers in 2016.
X should figure as a cautionary tale rather than a north star for Meta’s CEO. Advertisers and users alike have reportedly fled in droves since Musk took the helm of Twitter. Timelines are increasingly filled with far-right accounts posting a constant stream of misinformation. However, Meta has made it clear that this is the future he wants. “As well-intentioned as many of these efforts have been, they have expanded to the point that we are making too many mistakes, frustrating our users. Too often we stand in the way of the freedom of expression we are sworn to defend. We want to fix that and get back to it.” to that fundamental commitment,” Kaplan wrote about the problem of fact-checking and other moderation tools.
The appeal to “freedom of speech” reminds us of Musk’s repetitive speech, although in Meta’s case it is more of an effort to look good with MAGA than a commitment to abstract ideals. For years, the corporation has tried to counter accusations of bias from conservatives and has now chosen to abandon the fight altogether.
But at what price? Well, the most expensive one. The elimination of fact-checking is not beyond reproach, community notes can be effective as part of a larger moderation system. But in Kaplan’s announcement of the changes, or in Zuckerberg’s accompanying video, there was little hope that this would be an improvement. “From what I’ve seen so far, it looks like it’s going to be an absolute disaster,” suggests Alex Mahavedan, director of the Poynter Institute’s MediaWise digital media literacy project. The Poynter Institute also manages PolitiFact, which is Meta’s content review and fact-checking partner. “By putting so much emphasis on something as nebulous as ‘freedom of speech’without forgetting that the fact-checking It is in itself a form of expression, Meta runs the risk of falling into a permissiveness that allows misinformation to flourish.”explains Mahavedan. And he is not the only one.
The ghost of misinformation haunts Facebook, Threads and Instagram again. How did we get back here?
Verification of content in the hands of external parties
“Meta has always been a haven for Russian, Chinese and Iranian disinformation,” says Gordon Crovitz, co-CEO of NewsGuard, a company that offers a tool to assess the reliability of online information. He fact-checking It is not perfect; Croviz claims that NewsGuard has tracked several “false narratives” on Meta platforms. The community notes model that Meta will replace its fact-checking army with can still be effective. But Research by Mahavedan and other researchers shows that outsourcing solutions miss vast swaths of misinformation. And unless Meta commits to maximum transparency into the app and usage of its version, it will be impossible to know if the systems are working.
The move to community notes is also unlikely to solve the “bias” issue that Meta executives are so concerned about, given that it seems unlikely to exist in the first place. “The driving force behind this whole policy shift and Musk’s acquisition of Twitter is this accusation that social media companies are biased against conservatives. But there’s no real evidence of that,” said David Rand, a behavioral scientist at MIT.
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