Coinciding with the return of Donald Trump to the US presidency, Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp has announced it’s abandoning the independent fact-checking processes set up in 2016 in favour of a ‘community notes’ program, as used on Elon Musk’s X platform, where the community decides which posts are misleading or need more context.
Meta’s press release quotes a 2019 speech by its CEO Mark Zuckerberg in which he argued that free expression has been the driving force behind progress in American society and around the world, and that inhibiting speech, however well-intentioned the reasons for doing so, reinforces existing institutions and power structures instead of empowering people.
‘Some people believe giving more people a voice is driving division rather than bringing us together, said Mr Zuckerberg.
‘More people across the spectrum believe that achieving the political outcomes they think matter is more important than every person having a voice. I think that’s dangerous.’
How did that work out?
In practice, Meta’s policies and role in fuelling misinformation led to the earlier election of Donald Trump in the USA, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, and the success of Brexit in the UK.
As Meta sought to rebuild its credentials as a good corporate citizen following the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which Facebook data was manipulated and exploited for political purposes in the UK and elsewhere (without the permission of users), independent fact checking was one of Meta’s responses.
As their latest press release puts it, ‘The intention of the program was to have these independent experts give people more information about the things they see online, particularly viral hoaxes, so they were able to judge for themselves what they saw and read. That’s not the way things played out, especially in the United States…
‘A program intended to inform too often became a tool to censor.’
The statement goes on to say, ‘We want to undo the mission creep that has made our rules too restrictive and too prone to over-enforcement. We’re getting rid of a number of restrictions on topics like immigration, gender identity and gender that are the subject of frequent political discourse and debate.
‘It’s not right that things can be said on TV or on the floor of Congress, but not on our platforms.’
Trumped
Meta’s latest press release doesn’t mention Donald Trump anywhere, but his influence is clearly apparent on the new direction of the company.
After clashing with Mr Trump earlier, Mark Zuckerberg has grown increasingly close to the incoming president in recent years, along with his fellow billionaires, notably Jeff Bezos, with significant implications for global media and information and eco-systems.
Donald Trump praised Meta’s latest announcement. ‘I think they’ve come a long way,’ he told a press conference yesterday. When a journalist asked the President-elect if he thought Zuckerberg was responding to threats he had made in the past, Trump responded with one word: ‘Probably’.
While the changes at Meta will only affect the United States initially, they are expected to be rolled out globally in the near future, including Australia.
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