Mark Zuckerburg has recently announced that Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, will eliminate third-party fact-checking organizations with a new system known as “community notes.” Prior to this change, fact-checkers were pivotal in evaluating and flagging false information, which in turn helped the platform limit that content’s reach. This new approach was inspired by policies implemented by Elon Musk following his takeover of Twitter over two years ago, where he sought to weaken the platform’s content moderation policies in the name of promoting free speech by employing community notes as an alternative. Community notes function as a crowd-sourced method for users to moderate content without the social media platform overseeing the process. According to Zuckerburg, the reason for this shift is that fact-checkers have been shown to be “too politically biased” and have subsequently harmed “more trust than they’ve created.” This decision has dangerous implications for Meta’s over 3 billion users who will now be more susceptible to both misinformation and disinformation, particularly on controversial topics such as immigration, abortion, gender identity, and other emotionally charged content.
In recent years, platforms including Meta and X have increasingly aligned themselves with President-elect Donald Trump, who has consistently claimed that social media companies are advancing anti-conservative bias. For example, last year, Trump went as far as to threaten Zuckerberg with life in prison if he attempted to interfere with the 2024 election after he banned Trump’s account from his platform following the January 6 insurrection. Since then, however, Zuckerburg has attempted to mend their relationship by donating $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund as well as promoting Trump supporter Joel Kaplan to Meta’s global policy chief and Dana White to its board of directors. With these changes, many conservatives and free-speech activists, who believe that fact-checking disproportionately represses right-wing commentary, have hailed Meta’s new policy as a step away from content policing and censorship.
Many experts have expressed a great deal of fear over these changes and the immediate effects they will have on users. Kate Starbird, a University of Washington disinformation researcher, stated that “it is going to be more difficult for people to find information that they can trust online,” suggesting that there will be a rise in false and misleading information. An increase in false information can lead to the promotion of biased narratives, which can negatively impact vulnerable communities and work to justify violence against certain groups. This is especially problematic for researchers who depend on the work of fact-checkers to fully comprehend conspiracy theories and other forms of false information that circulate on social media. Other studies have shown that community notes may be too slow to intervene according to Al Jazeera. In another report analyzing Community Notes on X, the Center for Countering Digital Hate found that accurate community notes correcting false claims about the U.S. elections “were not displayed on 209 out of a sample of 283 posts deemed misleading—or 74%.” As a result, people now believe this policy shift will open the door for more MAGA-centered content to thrive.
With this change now underway, it will be necessary for independent users who are trained in debunking false information to continue to fill the gap left by Meta’s removal of fact-checkers. Moreover, promoting media literacy will be more important than ever, especially in light of ongoing global conflicts and recent elections worldwide. While these changes will undoubtedly contribute to an increase in hateful content, we must continue to use the tools that remain available to combat the spread of false information.
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