In the name of free expression, Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta will no longer use independent fact checkers on Facebook and Instagram.
These shall be replaced with “community notes”, where users themselves will judge the accuracy of posts.
Zuckerberg, looking fresh and casual, posted a video of himself on Meta, with an explanatory blog post, in which he said that third-party moderators were “too politically biased” and it was “time to get back to our roots around free expression”.
Anyone can see that the move is a deliberate shift adapting to a shifting ideological milieu, moving away from Jo Biden’s — and the democrats’ — philosophy of diplomacy and politeness, and towards Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s “tell it like it is” punch-in-the-gut, straightforward kind of attitude. What’s more, it’s not just a conceptual outlook, but an obvious attempt of Meta’s to keep in good relations with Trump, given that it will be introduced in the US, while the old system is to continue on in the EU and UK — where big tech firms are facing more and more control.
Meta has been using this fact-checking program since 2016, in which posts that are reported are referred to independent credibility assessment organisations.
It goes to show: meanwhile in Romania, the literary scene on Facebook has got its feathers ruffled in a very heated debate on Facebook surrounded.
Trump has specifically criticized Meta for its censorship, and has now praised Zuckerberg for his choice.
“It’s not right that things can be said on TV or the floor of Congress, but not on our platforms”, says Meta’s blogpost.
Naturally, the left was less than pleased. Meta has donation 1m$ to a Trump inauguration fund, and Zuckerberg has visited Trump in Florida. In the video, he went so far as to praise the elections as “a cultural tipping point prioritizing free speech”.
The new approach is directly copied from Elon Musk’s X, in which flagged posts simply have additional information labels, and require a further scroll. It is meant to function as an on-site hive mind, with people either agreeing or adding clarifications to controversial posts, free for all to see.
But Fact-checking organisation Full Fact calls this a “disappointing and a backwards step that risks a chilling effect around the world”.
Meanwhile, Meta argued that Facebook couldn’t keep up with checking if fact-checkers went too extreme.
“It means we’re going to catch less bad stuff, but we’ll also reduce the number of innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally take down”, Zuckerberg admits in the video.
