Meta Scrap fact-checker, eases content restrictions

Fact-checkers are headed for the dustbin of history to meet.

“We will end the current third-party fact-checking program in the US and move to a community notes program instead,” Mater Chief Global Affairs Officer Joel Kaplan announced on a company blog Tuesday.

Kaplan added that Meta will also deal with “mission creep,” which has made the rules governing company platforms too restrictive and vulnerable to over-enforcement.

“We are getting rid of many of the restrictions on issues such as immigration, gender identity and gender that are frequent subjects of political discussion and debate,” she wrote. “It’s not right that things can be said on TV or on the floor of Congress, but not on our platform.”

In addition, Meta will modify the automated systems that scan its platforms for policy violations “(T)his resulted in far too many mistakes and far too much content being censored that shouldn’t have been,” Kaplan wrote.

Going forward, the systems will focus on illegal and high-intensity violations such as terrorism, child sexual exploitation, drugs, fraud, and scams, while less serious policy violations will rely on someone reporting a problem before action is taken.

Meta makes removing content from the platform more difficult for multiple reviewers to reach a decision to take something down and allows users to view more civil content — posts about elections, politics, or social issues — if they wish.

Censorship tool

Kaplan explained that when Meta launched its independent fact-checking program in 2016, it didn’t want to be the arbiter of truth, so it turned over fact-checking content to independent organizations.

“The purpose of the program was for these independent experts to give people more information about what they see online, especially viral hoaxes, so they can make their own judgments about what they see and read,” he wrote.

“Especially not the way things have played out in the United States,” he continued. “Experts, like everyone else, have their own biases and perspectives. It is seen in the choices made about what is true and how it should be tested.”

“Over time, we’ve ended up fact-checking a lot of content that people will understand as legitimate political discourse and debate,” he noted. “Our system then attaches real consequences in the form of intrusive labels and reduced distribution. Often a program intended to inform becomes a tool to censor.”

David Inserra, a contributor to independent expression and technology Cato InstituteA Washington, D.C. think tank, served on a Facebook content policy team and said he was disturbed by the group’s selection bias. “The only people who joined as fact-checkers wanted to moderate the content,” he told TechNewsWorld. “People who wanted users to make their own decisions about content didn’t become fact-checkers.”

“My experience with Facebook’s fact-checking functionality has been pretty mixed overall,” added Darian Shimmy, CEO and founder. Future FundA fundraising platform for K-12 schools and PTAs in Pleasanton, Calif.

“It’s safe to say that it adds a layer of accountability, but frankly, I’ve found that keeping up with the speed of viral misinformation is very slow and inconsistent,” he told TechNewsWorld. “Talking to a lot of people in my circles and researching internally, I found that most people felt that relying on third-party fact-checkers creates a sense of bias, which doesn’t always help build trust with users.”

‘Not a victory for free speech’

Irina RykuDirector of Internet Ethics at Santa Clara University’s Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, noted that Facebook has shown a lot of confusion under existing fact-checking systems.

“Part of the problem was the automation of content moderation,” he told TechNewsWorld. “Algorithmic tools were quite blunt and missed nuances in both language and imagery. And the problem was more widespread in posts in languages ​​other than English.”

“With billions of pieces of content posted every day, it was impossible for human fact-checkers to keep up,” added Paul Benigeri, co-founder and CEO. ArchiveA company that creates software to automate e-commerce digital marketing workflows in New York City

“The fact-checking felt like a PR move,” he told TechNewsWorld. “Sometimes it worked, but it didn’t come close to catching the full volume of misleading posts.”

Meta’s cancellation of its fact-checking system was questioned by Tal-Or Cohen Montemayor, founder and executive director. CyberwellA non-profit organization dedicated to combating anti-Semitism on social media, headquartered in San Francisco.

“While previous fact-checking systems have proven to be an ineffective and unscalable method of combating misinformation and disinformation in real-time conflicts and emergencies,” he told TechNewsWorld, “the answer may be less accountability and less investment.” No. Platform.”

“This is not a victory for free speech,” he declared. “It’s the exchange of human bias in a small and inclusive group of fact-checkers for human bias through community notes. The only way to prevent censorship and data manipulation by any government or corporation is through legal requirements and reforms in big tech that enforce social media reforms and transparency requirements.”

Defective community solutions

Meta’s Community Note replacement for fact-checking is a similar scheme deployed on X, formerly Twitter. “The community-based approach is nice in that it partially deals with the issue of scale,” he said Cody Bantenis an assistant professor in the College of Information at the University of Maryland. “It allows a lot more people to get involved in the process and add context.”

“The problem is community notes, while it can work on a large aggregate scale for the occasional piece of information or the occasional viral story, it’s usually not fast enough and gets completely overwhelmed with new big events,” he explained.

“We saw this after the attack on Israel in October 2023,” he continued. “There were people who were extremely engaged in the community notes process, but Twitter as a platform was overwhelmed and overwhelmed by the amount of misinformation going around this event.”

“When platforms say, ‘We’ll wash our hands of it and let the community deal with it,’ it becomes problematic in these moments where the only people who can really deal with the massive flow of high-velocity, low-quality data are the platforms, ” he said. “Community Notes isn’t really set up to deal with these issues and those are the moments when you want high-quality information the most.”

“I’ve never been a fan of community notes,” added Karen Kovacs North, clinical professor of communication Annenberg University of Southern California School for Communication and Journalism.

“The kind of people who want to put notes on something are usually polarizing and emotional,” he told TechNewsWorld. “The middle-of-the-radar doesn’t take the time to comment on stories or pieces of content.”

Curry for Trump

Vincent RaynaldAn assistant professor in Emerson College’s Department of Communication Studies, noted that community moderation sounds great in theory but has some problems. “Although the content may be flagged as misleading or misleading, the content is still available for people to consume,” he told TechNewsWorld.

“So even though some people may see the community notes, they can still consume that content and that content can still influence their attitudes, knowledge and behavior,” he explained.

Along with Kaplan’s announcement, Meta released a video CEO Mark Zuckerberg welcomed the company’s latest move. “We will go back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies and restoring free expression on our platforms,” ​​he said.

“Zuckerberg’s announcement has nothing to do with making Metar’s platforms better and nothing to do with technology for Donald Trump,” he stressed. Dan KennedyProfessor of Journalism at Northeastern University in Boston.

“There was a time when Zuckerberg was careful about using his products to spread dangerous misinformation and confusion about the January 6 uprising and Covid,” he told TechNewsWorld. “Now Trump is back in office, and one of Zuckerberg’s rivals, Elon Musk, is working on Trump’s favor, so Zuckerberg is carrying the program.”

“No system of vetting and moderation is perfect,” he added, “but if Zuckerberg really cared, he would work to improve it rather than get rid of it entirely.”

Musk as a trend setter

Damian Rollison, Director of Marketing SOCiA comarketing cloud platform headquartered in San Diego, Meta’s latest move points to an irony. “I think it’s safe to say that no one predicted that Elon Musk’s chaotic adoption of Twitter would become a trend that other tech platforms would follow, and yet here we are,” he told TechNewsWorld.

“We can now see, in retrospect, that Musk has set the standard for a new conservative approach to loosening online content moderation, which Meta has now adopted in anticipation of the incoming Trump administration,” he said.

“What this could potentially mean is an increase in political discourse and posts on controversial topics on Facebook and Instagram,” he continued.

“Like Musk’s X, where ad revenue has halved, this change could make the platform less attractive to advertisers,” he added. “It could also cement a trend where Facebook is becoming the social network for older, more conservative users and connecting Gen Z with TikTok, with Instagram occupying a middle ground between them.”