Gordon Crovitz, co-CEO of NewsGuard, a company that provides tools to evaluate the credibility of online information, said: “Meta has long been a repository for Russian, Chinese and Russian disinformation. China and Iran. “Now, Meta has apparently decided to fully open the floodgates.”
Again, fact-checking is not perfect; Croviz said that NewsGuard had been tracking a number of “false narratives” on Meta's platform. And the community notes model with which Meta will replace its fact-checking battalions may still be somewhat effective. But study from Mahavedan and others have shown that crowdsourced solutions miss a lot of false positives. And unless Meta commits to maximum transparency about how its versions are deployed and used, it will be impossible to know whether the system works or not.
It's also unlikely that the move to community notes will solve the “bias” problem that Meta executives cite so concerned about on the surface, since it doesn't appear to exist in the first place.
“The driving force behind all of Meta's policy changes and Musk's takeover of Twitter is the accusation of bias against social media companies,” said David Rand, a behavioral scientist at MIT. with conservatives.” “There's no good evidence of that.”
In a recent edition paper in the journal Nature, Rand and his co-authors found that although Twitter users who used Trump-related hashtags in 2020 were four times more likely to be suspended than those who people used the pro-Biden hashtag, but they were also more likely to have shared “low-quality” or misleading news.
“Just because there is a difference in who is dealt with, that doesn't mean there is bias,” Rand said. “Crowd ratings can do a pretty good job of replicating fact-checker ratings… You will still see more conservatives punished than liberals.”
And while set your own community notes style system. “There's a reason there's only one Wikipedia in the world,” Matzarlis said. “It's very difficult to get anything crowdfunded on a large scale.”
As for relaxing Meta's Hateful Conduct policy, that in itself is a political choice. It still allows some things and disallows others; moving those boundaries to accommodate bigotry doesn't mean they don't exist. It just means that Meta is more okay with it than it was back in the day.
A lot depends on exactly how Meta's system will work in practice. But amid changes to moderation and revisions to community guidelines, Facebook, Instagram and Threads are moving toward a world where anyone can say that gay and transgender people have “mental illness,” where the decline of AI will grow even stronger, where outrageous claims spread unchecked, where the truth is easily malleable.
You know: like X.