“Meta has always been a home for Russian, Chinese, and Iranian disinformation,” said Gordon Crovitz, CEO of NewsGuard, a company that provides a tool to check the credibility of online information. “Now, Meta has apparently decided to open the floodgates completely.”
Also, fact-checking is not perfect; Croviz says NewsGuard has tracked down several “fake stories” on Meta platforms. And the public notes model where Meta will change its fact-checking battles may still work in some way. But research from Mahavedan and others has shown that crowdsourced solutions miss a lot of misinformation. And unless Meta commits to the highest transparency in how its version is used and implemented, you won’t know if the systems are working at all.
And it’s unlikely that the switch to public notes will solve the “bias” problem that Meta executives cite as being so concerned about, given that it seems unlikely in the first place.
“The driving force behind all of these changes in Meta’s policies and Musk’s takeover of Twitter is this accusation that social media companies are biased toward conservatives,” said David Rand, a behavioral scientist at MIT. “There is no good evidence for that.”
In a paper recently published in Nature, Rand and colleagues found that while Twitter users who used a Trump-related hashtag in 2020 were four times more likely to eventually be suspended than those who used pro-Biden hashtags, they were also significantly more likely. you may share “low quality” or misleading stories.
“Just because there’s a difference in who’s doing something, that doesn’t mean there’s bias,” said Rand. “Crowd polls can do a pretty good job of reproducing fact-check polls … You’ll still see more conservatives approved than liberals.”
And while X is getting a lot of attention in part because of Musk, keep in mind that it’s an order of magnitude smaller than Facebook’s 3 billion active users, which will present its own challenges when Meta introduces its social note-style system. “There’s a reason there’s only one Wikipedia in the world,” Matzarlis said. “It’s very difficult to get anything that populates without a foundation.”
As for the relaxation of the Meta Hate Conduct policy, that in itself is an inherently political choice. It still allows some things and disallows others; removing those boundaries to accommodate racism doesn’t mean they don’t exist. It just means that the Meta is much better with it than it was yesterday.
Much depends on how the Meta program will work in practice. But between moderation changes and the evolution of social guidelines, Facebook, Instagram, and Threads are headed for a world where anyone can say that gay people have a “mental illness,” where AI slop will increase exponentially, where claims are wild. they are spread unchecked, when the truth itself is soft.
You know: like X.