“A cultural turning point.” This is what Mark Zuckerberg has called his decision to eliminate the data verification system on Facebook, Instagram and the rest of Meta platforms. The model, established a little more than five years after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, is based on the work of journalists and professionals in the factcheckingwhich flag false or incorrect publications so that they can be detected by other users.
“We will return to our roots and focus on reducing errors, simplifying our policies and restoring freedom of expression on our platforms,” Zuckerberg stated in a video posted on his Facebook profile. “First, we are going to get rid of the fact-checkers and replace them with community notes similar to X, starting with the United States,” he said.
In the X (formerly Twitter) community notes system, it is the users themselves who can write and rate notes that clarify, correct or provide additional information about a tweet. These notes are displayed publicly as an appendix to the publication if they pass a voting system in which other users rate them as “useful.” Elon Musk’s account is one of the ones that receives the most notices from the community on the entire platform.
“We’ve seen this approach work on X where they empower their community to decide when posts are potentially misleading and need more context, and people from a wide range of perspectives decide what kind of context is useful for other users to see.” , has explained in a statement the new head of public policies at Meta, Joel Kaplan.
Kaplan replaced Nick Clegg, former British deputy prime minister, also elected in reaction to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in the position last week. Kaplan was a member of George Bush’s administration for eight years, becoming the right-hand man of his chief of staff in the White House.
Kaplan is known for his positions close to President-elect Donald Trump, one of the main enemies of independent fact-checkers. “We think this might be a better way to achieve our original intention of giving people information about what they’re seeing, and one that’s less prone to bias,” Kaplan continues.
“Restore freedom of expression” and end “censorship”
Zuckerberg, who has also become closer to Trump since his re-election despite Trump threatening to imprison him in the summer, has stressed that the change is a way to “restore freedom of expression on our platforms.” “The recent elections seem like a cultural turning point towards prioritizing, once again, freedom of expression,” he points out in his video.
Also, in line with Elon Musk, he has taken the opportunity to criticize “governments and traditional media” for, according to him, pushing to “censor more and more.” “We’ve created a lot of complex systems to moderate content, but the problem with complex systems is that they make mistakes,” he says: “Even if they accidentally censor just 1% of posts, that’s millions of people, and we’ve reached a point at which there are too many errors and too much censorship.”
The founder of Facebook has not clarified when these changes will be imposed in Europe. In Spain, organizations such as Fundación Maldita or Newtral were hired by Meta to carry out this independent verification on their platforms. At the moment, none of them have taken a position regarding Zuckerberg’s decision.
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