About a year ago SpaceX, Tesla and X (Twitter) owner Elon Musk and Meta (Facebook, Instagram) Mark Zuckerberg agreed to fight in a ring. The fight may never have happened, since, even for this, one tycoon blamed the other, but finally it seems that they have found a point on which they will agree: freedom of speech on the social media they own.
Facebook's parent company, Meta, announced yesterday that it will stop the system of fact checkers, i.e. groups that check posts and "take them down" if they judge that they spread fake news or violate community terms, and that it will adopt a system of "community notes ». That is essentially what happens in X, where the posts are not "taken down", but there is the right for users to quote notes on any post they deem to be quoting false, distorted, or incomplete information. Restoring the truth is therefore left to the user community and not to a third party.
So why is Meta making this sharp turn? "It's a return to our roots," says Zuckerberg, but in reality, it's yet another shift at the social media giant that's turning it to the... right, to make itself more likeable to Donald Trump. Just a day earlier, Zuckerberg had added UFC CEO Dana White, one of Trump's staunchest supporters—and a longtime friend of the incoming president—to Meta's board. Coincidentally, White was also the man who would arrange and oversee the boxing match between Musk and Zuckerberg! It was also the second placement of a Trump person at its parent company Facebook, after the "removal" of Meta's President of International Relations, Nick Clegg, and his replacement by Joel Kaplan, a Republican who has even served in the White House during the presidency George Bush.
All about Trump
It's clear that Zuckerberg, especially after meeting him at Mar-a-Lago, is trying hard to ingratiate himself with Trump. He donated $1 million to the new president's inauguration fund, put a childhood friend of Trump's on his company's board and a hard-line Republican in the group's top policymaking position, and now, he's changing what had made him a "red flag" in his eyes Trump. The fact checkers, whom he sends to the... fire outside, to satisfy Trump, before he (again) enters the White House.
"Fact checkers have been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they've built," Zuckerberg said in a video announcing the changes on Facebook. "What started as a movement to be more inclusive has gradually been used to silence opinions and silence people with different ideas, and it's happened."
The third-party fact-checking system that Meta uses to this day, and used by Twitter until it was acquired by Musk, has often come under criticism for violating free speech. Based on the guidelines of fact checking groups, the algorithm often removes posts, or mutes users for certain periods of time, even if they use a "forbidden" word, or image. For example, someone might be referring to historical events of the World War II period and find their Facebook account suddenly down because they used the name "Hitler" in a narrative. This rather oversensitive use of the system and the unchallenged imposition of the truth by fact checkers has led to user complaints, turning many of them to alternative social media such as X.
Most of all, however, it had irked Donald Trump and Republicans, who felt that Zuckerberg had long silenced their positions on important issues in order to inflict political costs on them.
That's why Meta has been gradually reducing the "downloading" of election-related content over the past few years, such as allowing users to post allegations of voter fraud and political ads questioning the outcome of the election. 2020. It was clearly a "conciliatory" move with Republicans, who had accused the company of "censoring" conservative voices. Going a step further on the Republican side, Zuckerberg, in a letter to the House Judiciary Committee last summer, said the Biden administration had "pressured" Meta to "censor" content during the pandemic , a statement used by Trump to elevate the argument of tampering with the 2020 election to his campaign agenda.
In Musk's footsteps
Over the next few months, due to Zuckerberg's changes to content management and control on Meta's platforms, we will see a dramatic change in the way Facebook and Instagram handle false and misleading claims, as well as malicious content. Zuckerberg acknowledged that the changes will inevitably "leap" malicious content, but that's something users will have to put up with until the new system works properly.
What is removed? The independent fact-checking program Meta launched on its platforms in 2016 in the wake of allegations that it failed to stop Russian, Chinese and North Korean accounts from leveraging its platforms to spread misinformation and sow discord among Americans. The company created security teams, introduced automated programs to filter out or reduce the visibility of false claims, and established a kind of independent Supreme Court for tough coordination decisions, known as the Oversight Board. Thus, it began to remove content from its platform that it deemed misinformation about elections, vaccinations, violence and hate speech.
Amid calls to curtail free speech, Zuckerberg, who says "we've gotten to a point where there's a lot of wrongdoing and a lot of censorship," is following in the "steps" of Elon Musk, who after buying Twitter, the 2022, dissolved the company's control groups. Instead of fact checkers, Musk added, user-generated content tags called "community notes" are the platform's only method of correcting false claims.
Meta is now also bringing this system to Facebook, Instagram and Threads, starting in the US, where it is ending its partnership with third-party fact checkers and establishing similar community notes across its platforms. At the moment, fact checkers are not being removed in Europe, although it is expected that the community notes system will be implemented on its platforms around the world very soon.
The company is also removing content restrictions on certain topics, such as immigration and gender identity, and removing limits on how much political content users see in their feeds.
Meta will also readjust its algorithm that detects violations of the community terms of policy, which it says have resulted in "too much content being censored that shouldn't have been censored." The systems will now focus on screening only for illegal and "high seriousness" offences, such as terrorism, child sexual exploitation, drugs, fraud and scams. Other concerns should be reported by users before the company evaluates them.
Source: protothema.gr
Discussion about this post