Meta Ditches Fact-Checkers Ahead of Trump’s Second Term

Facebook has already contributed to the end of journalism and this will be the last nail,” Nina Jankowicz, former Biden disinformation czar who is now the CEO of the American Sunlight Project, said in an email. “Newsrooms receive money from Facebook to show the truth. The money allows them to do other journalism. Zuckerberg’s announcement is a complete knee-jerk reaction to Trump and an attempt to meet Musk in his race to the bottom. Fact checking wasn’t the solution to Facebook news but it was an important part of the process. “

On what he tried to fix if he wanted to get rid of discrimination, Zuckerberg said that Meta’s reliability and security team is moving from California to Texas, where X is also headquartered. concerns about bias in our groups,” Zuckerberg said.

X channel BlueSky announced in August last year that it is also considering introducing a Community Notes feature to address the problem of “dog overpopulation and other cruelty.” This show has not been launched yet.

Like X, the Meta system will use an army of volunteers who write articles for the community, but in order for the articles to be visible to all users, some volunteers will need to vote to approve the article. “Like X, Group Writing requires collaboration between people with different perspectives to help avoid bias,” Kaplan said.

“We’ve seen this approach work on X – where they empower their community to decide when posts are misleading and need more information, and different people decide what’s useful to other users,” he said. Kaplan wrote.

But Community Notes on X, which was first introduced as BirdWatch in 2021, has been shown time and time again to not only fail to address the problem of vulgarity and hate speech that has come to dominate the platform, but actually. adding to the problem.

Zuckerberg, who recently visited Trump at Mar-a-Lago and brought the president-elect the company’s new AR glasses, also criticized lawmakers in Europe and Latin America for overzealous surveillance and stifling free speech.

“We will work with President Trump to push back against governments around the world that are going after American companies and insist that they see more,” Zuckerberg said.

But critics of Zuckerberg and Meta were quick to criticize the policy changes. “Meta’s announcement today is an end to any efficient and secure way of managing content,” a The Real Facebook Steering Committeean activist group that was formed in response to the establishment of the Meta regulatory body, he said in a statement.

“Censorship is a manufactured problem, political parties show that Meta platforms are open to businesses spreading right-wing propaganda. Twitter’s shift away from censorship has turned the platform into a cesspool; Zuckerberg has joined the race to the bottom.”