“Meta has always been home to Russian, Chinese and Iranian disinformation,” claims Gordon Crovitz, co-CEO of NewsGuard, a company that provides a tool for evaluating the credibility of online information. “Now, Meta has apparently decided to open the floodgates completely.”
Again, the fact-checking is not perfect; Crowitz says NewsGuard has already tracked several “false narratives” on Meta's platform. And the Community Notes model with which Meta will replace its fact-checking battalions may still be effective to some extent. But Research Mahavedan and others have shown that crowdsourced solutions do not take into account the mass of misinformation. And unless Meta commits to maximum transparency in implementing and using its version, it will be impossible to know whether the systems are working at all.
It's also unlikely that switching to community notes will solve the “bias” problem that Meta officials are outwardly concerned about, given that it seems unlikely to exist in the first place.
“The changes in Meta's policies and Musk's takeover of Twitter are a result of accusations that social media companies are biased against conservatives,” said David Rand, a behavioral scientist at MIT. “There is no good evidence of this.”
In a recently published paper In Nature, Rand and her co-authors found that while Twitter users who used Trump-related hashtags in 2020 were four times more likely to ultimately be suspended than those who used pro-Biden hashtags , they were also more likely to share. Low-quality” or misleading news.
“Just because there is a difference in who is being acted upon does not mean there is bias,” says Rand. “Crowd ratings can do a pretty good job of reproducing fact-checker ratings… You'll still see more conservatives approving than liberals.”
And while Will present challenges. There is only one Wikipedia in the world,” Matzarlis says. “It's very hard to get anything crowdsourced off the ground on a large scale.”
As far as loosening META's hateful conduct policy goes, that in itself is a natural political choice. It is still allowing some things and not allowing others; Removing those boundaries to accommodate bigotry doesn't mean they don't exist. It just means the meta is more okay with it than it was the day before.
A lot depends on how Meta's system will work in practice. But amid changes in moderation and changes in community guidelines, Facebook, Instagram, and Threads are veering toward a world where anyone can say that gay and trans people are “mental illnessWhere AI sloppiness will spread even more aggressively, where outrageous claims will spread unchecked, where truth itself is malleable.
You know: just like X.