Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Chief Global Affairs Officer Joel Kaplan have announced the company is ending its fact-checking system in favor of a community notes model, much like the system on X.
However, critics say the shift is simply an attempt to appease the incoming Trump administration and cause real-world harm to already marginalized communities through increased hate speech and misinformation.
Why is Meta scrapping the fact-based system?
“In recent years, we’ve developed increasingly complex systems to manage content across our platforms, partly in response to societal and political pressure to moderate content. This approach has gone too far,” Kaplan and Zuckerberg said. Kaplan noted that harmless content was being censored, and users unfairly found themselves in ‘Facebook Jail.’ Meanwhile, Zuckerberg found that the system became “too politically biased.”
Zuckerberg also believes the systems have become “too politically biased” and “destroyed more trust than they’ve created, especially in the US.”
CBNC reported that Zuckerberg said: “The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech, so we’re going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies, and restoring free expression on our platforms.”
What changes are Meta making now?
Meta will now introduce a community notes feature, which will be implemented in the US in the next few months. This feature will be reviewed by contributing users adding context to posts across WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook. The move aims to ease its content policies by removing limitations on topics like gender and immigration while prioritize reviewing illegal and high-severity violations.
Meta will also move its trust, safety, and content moderation teams from California to Texas. This change is significant as, historically, California is a democratic state, and Texas typically votes Republican. It’s part of Meta’s plans to work on its relationship with President-elect Donald Trump before the inauguration on January 20, 2025.
Will this stop misinformation from spreading?
Though Meta’s fact-based system did censor harmless content, it removed content that violated Meta’s community standards and spread false news. Now that Meta is moving to a community notes model, which was introduced by X (formerly Twitter). Will it stop misinformation from spreading?
On X, community notes work by creating a box underneath a post that has been flagged as misinformation or false. However, any user on X can create those notes as their account is at least six months old, has a phone number, a supported phone number, and no new “recent violations” of X’s rules.
Even though the post will be flagged with a note, it does not limit how many users interact or see it. Whereas Meta’s fact-checking system did. Will this new feature tackle misinformation? The answer isn’t straightforward.
“While some research has shown people trust crowdsourced fact checks and that the idea has promise, it’s still very much an experiment,” said Alex Mahadevan, director of MediaWise, Poynter’s digital media literacy project.
“An analysis I did with Alexios Mantzarlis, director of the Security, Trust & Safety Initiative at Cornell Tech, showed that Community Notes was ineffective on Election Day. It’s irresponsible to roll out a product like that — “over the next couple of months” — on such massive platforms like Facebook and Instagram.”
Will this affect Black and Brown communities?
Campaigners against hate speech online have criticized Meta’s shift as an attempt to shrug off responsibility for managing hate speech and disinformation on its platforms and raised concerns about the impact on people of color and other marginalized groups.
Black people are more likely to encounter disinformation and fake news, according to a report published by Onyx Impact. The team of researchers found 2500 online accounts creating and sharing disinformation with Black communities. This new move made by Meta could mean that misinformation on Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook could be shared more easily in Black communities.
Read: New Survey Exposes Social Media’s Role In Misinforming Black Communities
Misinformation about Black people could also be shared more widely. Mahadevan gave an example of this in 2023, when CNN tweeted: ‘Black fathers are often portrayed as absent or distant, but that isn’t what most people experience, according to both data and Black dads themselves. Such biased portrayals are often based on who is telling the story.”
X users added a community note citing outdated and misleading data about Black single-parent families. “It was a racist note based on faulty data,” Mahadevan said. “Millions of people saw this.”
Will Meta’s community notes feature suffer from the same pitfalls? We will have to wait and see.
Image credit: Dean Drobot
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