X seems like a cautionary tale for Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg: The case against Facebook, Donald Trump, Dana White, and the International Fact-Checking Network
X seems like it should be a cautionary tale rather than a North Star for Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Advertisers and users have fled in droves since Musk took. Timelines are increasingly filled with far-right debate-me edgelord accounts that post a constant churn of misinformation. (And that’s just the owner.) Meta has made it clear that it wants this to be the future.
It may soon be hard to tell the difference. Meta chief policy officer Joel Kaplan took to the internet yesterday to make a comparison between Meta’s Community notes model and its Hate, saying that Meta would torpedo its fact checking partners in favor of the model. Last week, it appointed friend of Donald Trump and Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO Dana White to its board, and elevated Kaplan, who is firmly entrenched in Republican circles.
“I’ve been expecting Meta to axe this program for years,” says Alexios Matzarlis, director of Cornell University’s Security, Trust, and Safety Initiative and founding director of the International Fact-Checking Network, which helped establish the partnership between Facebook and fact-checkers in 2016. That is nakedly political, and not in this manner or with this timing.
“As well-intentioned as many of these efforts have been, they have expanded over time to the point where we are making too many mistakes, frustrating our users and too often getting in the way of the free expression we set out to enable,” Kaplan wrote of the fact-checking program and other moderation tools. We want to return to that fundamental commitment to free expression.
Even so, Keller says she worries that Zuckerberg’s rhetoric toward Europe in his announcement could create a dynamic that emboldens European regulators who want to go after US platforms over speech concerns. Keller says that the offended people will take that as a sign that they will get their back up and be able to punish Meta more. “It’s almost like he’s going to drive them into becoming the censors that he claims they are now.”
Why destroy protections for Meta’s most vulnerable users? In a video statement on Tuesday, Zuckerberg explained that the policies were “out of touch with mainstream discourse” and that “recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech.” (Zuckerberg, no one’s idea of a political theorist, didn’t really explain why fact-checking, itself the sort of speech that free-speech activists have long held is the appropriate reaction to bad speech, isn’t worth prioritizing, nor did he explain what he has against the many forms of speech that Meta will still suppress. Free expression, it seems, is identical with whatever Meta happens not to be banning at a given moment.)
Europe isn’t asking any platforms to remove lawful content, Regnier said during a press conference. “We just need to make the difference between illegal content and then content that is potentially harmful … There, we ask just platforms to take appropriate risk mitigation measures.”
Others, like London School of Economics and Political Science associate law professor Martin Husovec, have said that fears that the DSA would turn the EU into a “Ministry of Truth are misplaced,” since even though there’s opportunity for abuse, the law is not “pre-programmed” to suppress lawful disinformation.
TikTok: Facebook, Twitter, and the U.S. Supreme Court are all out to save the day: How to stop the babes from crying on Instagram
Often, I’ll come across it as a comment on a video of a teenager on TikTok doing something that could easily be considered embarrassing, like singing out of key or obsessing over something others find cringe. Even more upsettingly, you’ll find that comment, word for word, on videos from people with disabilities simply existing. These commenters say this because they believe it’s easier to be nasty to people on Instagram and other Meta platforms. If these usersposted to Reels instead of TikTok, they would receive the harassment commenters believe they deserve.
And yet, it’s TikTok staring down the barrel of a nationwide ban this week. Mark Facebook made his platforms more dangerous so he could appease the incoming president.
All of this comes with an update to Meta’s Community Guidelines, including its Hateful Conduct policy, that essentially allows users to make blatantly homophobic, transphobic, sexist, and racist posts without consequences, as my colleague Kate Knibbs reported this week. Meta took out a sentence from its guidelines explaining that it can promote offline violence, after lost amongst other changes. Doing so immediately following the anniversary of January 6 is truly something to behold!
The Supreme Court will also take up TikTok’s lawsuit against the US government and its attempts to ban the app nationwide. We are now less than two weeks away from the sale or extension deadline so the court has barely any time to save the app.