Meta Is Taking All The Wrong Lessons From X

“Meta has been the home of Russia, China, and Iran forever,” says Gordon Crovitz, CEO of NewsGuard, a company that provides a tool to monitor the reliability of online information. “Now, Meta has apparently decided to open all the doors.”

Again, fact checking is not good; Croviz says NewsGuard has already tracked several “fake stories” on Meta platforms. And the kind of community notes that Meta will replace its review buttons with can be helpful. But research from Mahavedan and others have shown that many people’s answers miss a lot of false information. And unless Meta commits to better reflect how its brand is used and used, it will be impossible to know if the system is working at all.

It’s also unlikely that changes to the community’s documentation will solve the problem of “bias” that Meta administrators refer to as external concerns, as it seems unlikely to exist in the first place.

“The driving force behind all of Meta’s policy changes and Musk’s takeover of Twitter is the charge that the media industry favors conservatives,” said David Rand, a behavioral scientist at MIT. “There is no good evidence for this.”

In a recent publication paper in Nature, Rand and his co-authors found that while Twitter users who used a Trump-related hashtag in 2020 were four times more likely to be blocked than those who used pro-Biden hashtags, they were also more likely to share “low” or fake news.

“Just because there’s a difference in who’s being treated, it doesn’t mean there’s bias,” says Rand. “Population polls can do a better job of reflecting reality… You still see more conservatives than liberals.”

And while X makes a lot of sense thanks to Musk, keep in mind that it’s an order of magnitude smaller than Facebook’s 3 billion monthly users, which poses its own challenges when Meta launches its own text messaging system. “There’s a reason there’s only one Wikipedia in the world,” Matzarlis says. “It’s very difficult to get a lot of people at any level.”

As for the release of Meta’s Hateful Conduct policy, that in itself is a political decision. It still allows some things and disallows others; moving the boundary to accommodate discrimination does not mean it does not exist. It just means that the Meta is better than it was yesterday.

Much depends on how the Meta system will work. But in the midst of less-than-stellar changes and improved community guidelines, Facebook, Instagram, and Threads are looking at a world where everyone can say they’re gay and have “mental illness,” where the decline of AI will increase exponentially, where blasphemy spreads unchecked, where the real truth is easy to understand.

You know: like X.