MARK ZUCKERBERG conceded there would be more ‘bad stuff’ on his sites. Here’s the latest
Meta on Tuesday announced changes to its content moderation practice that would effectively end a fact-checking program instituted to curtail the spread of misinformation across its social media apps. Instead of using news organizations and other third-party groups, Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and Threads, will rely on users to add notes to posts that may contain false or misleading information.
The reversal of the years-old policy is a stark sign of how the company is repositioning itself for the Trump presidency in the weeks before it begins. Meta described the changes with the language of a mea culpa: Joel Kaplan, Meta’s newly installed global policy chief, said in a statement that the company wanted to “undo the mission creep that has made our rules too restrictive and too prone to over-enforcement.”
Meta’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, said in a video that the new protocol, which will begin in the United States in the coming months, is similar to the one used by X, called Community Notes.
“It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression,” Mr. Zuckerberg said. The company’s current fact-checking system, he added, had “reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship.”
Here’s what to know:
A trade-off: Mr. Zuckerberg conceded that there would be more “bad stuff” on the platform as a result of the decision. “The reality is that this is a trade-off,” he said. “It means that 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.”
Advance notice: Meta executives recently gave a heads-up to Trump officials about the change in policy, according to a person with knowledge of the conversations who spoke on condition of anonymity. The fact-checking announcement coincided with an appearance by Joel Kaplan, Meta’s newly installed global policy chief, on “Fox & Friends,” a favorite show of President-elect Donald J. Trump. Mr. Kaplan told the hosts of the morning show popular with conservatives that there was “too much political bias” in the fact-checking program.
Currying favor: Ever since Mr. Trump’s victory in November, few big companies have worked as overtly to curry favor with the president-elect. In a series of announcements during the presidential transition period, Meta has sharply shifted its strategy in response to what Mr. Zuckerberg called a “cultural tipping point” marked by the election.
Inspired by X: Mr. Zuckerberg seems to be taking a page from Mr. Trump’s favorite tech mogul, Elon Musk. Mr. Musk has relied on Community Notes to flag misleading posts on X. Since taking over the social network, Mr. Musk, a major Trump donor, has increasingly positioned X as the platform behind the new Trump presidency.
Conservatives cheer: Meta’s move on Tuesday morning elated conservative allies of Mr. Trump, many of whom have disliked Meta’s practice of adding disclaimers or warnings to questionable or false posts. Mr. Trump has long railed against Mr. Zuckerberg, claiming the fact-checking feature treated posts by conservative users unfairly.
Eased restrictions: Among the changes announced on Tuesday are the removal of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender identity that Mr. Zuckerberg said were “out of touch with mainstream discourse.” The company’s trust and safety and content moderation teams will be moved away from California, with the U.S. content review shifting to Texas, in a move that would “help remove the concern that biased employees are overly censoring content,” Mr. Zuckerberg added.
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Meta Turns to Community Notes, Mirroring X
Social media companies are increasingly relying on fact-checks written by their users, allowing companies to step back from politically loaded decisions about what content to take down.
Elon Musk’s X, which stopped using employees to fact-check posts, relies heavily on its users to police its site for misinformation in a program called Community Notes. YouTube has also begun testing a similar feature, although it uses third-party evaluators to determine whether the corrective notes are helpful.
The decisions to move away from strict rules about what is allowed on the sites and employing thousands of content moderators to police them follows yearslong complaints from Republicans that social media companies effectively censored conservative voices. And, despite the companies’ moderation efforts, many social media researchers still found myriad posts containing rule-breaking content.
X’s Community Notes began before Mr. Musk acquired the company in 2022. But Mr. Musk aggressively accelerated the program and largely did away with the fact-checking labels the company had once applied to misleading posts about hot-button issues like elections and the Covid-19 pandemic.
Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, nodded to X’s influence in his announcement. “We’re going to get rid of fact checkers and replace them with Community Notes similar to X, starting in the U.S.,” Mr. Zuckerberg said.
Mr. Musk, responding in a post on X on Tuesday, said, “This is cool.”
Community Notes allows users who participate in the program to write fact-checks for any post on X. The approach works for topics on which there is broad consensus, researchers have found. But users with differing political viewpoints have to agree on a fact-check before it is publicly appended to a post, which means that misleading posts about politically divisive subjects often go unchecked.
MediaWise, a media literacy program at the Poynter Institute, found in July that only about 6 percent of the drafted Community Notes on posts about immigration became public, and only 4 percent of drafted fact-checks on posts about abortion were published.
The program has also added fact-checking labels to X posts that turned out to be accurate. During hurricane season, Community Notes participants incorrectly labeled storm forecasts as inaccurate.
Keith Coleman, a vice president of product at X who oversees the Community Notes program, said in a recent interview with Asterisk Magazine that social media users distrusted companies’ fact-checking.
“A lot of people just did not want a tech or media company deciding what was or was not misleading,” Mr. Coleman said. “So even if you could put labels on content, if people think it’s biased, they’re not likely to be very informed by it.”
Source: The New York Times
