Facebook, and social media in general, started out as a fun place to share quips or stay connected with friends and family.
But the rise of misinformation has taken a bit of the bloom off the rose in recent years, with everything from crackpot conspiracy theories, racist tropes and outright lies showing up more and more on social media.
The former Twitter, now X, dropped the fact-checkers that tried to keep bad information in line after ego-inflated billionaire Elon Musk bought the platform in 2022 and willingly belly-flopped it into a cesspool of misinformation.
And now Meta and its largest platform, Facebook, is following suit. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced it is dropping its professional fact-checkers in the U.S. and loosening its hateful speech guidelines — all in the name of, as he claims, bolstering free speech.
Zuckerberg said — amazingly, with a straight face — that the move would “dramatically reduce censorship,” on Facebook, Threads and Instagram. Fact-checkers “have just been too politically biased, and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created, especially in the U.S.”
Hogwash. It would be one thing if traffickers of social media misinformation and disinformation were just keyboard warriors, neighborhood yahoos, and run-of-the-mill malcontents.
But much of the hate and falsehoods on Facebook and other platforms are the result of sophisticated campaigns by organizations, political parties — even foreign governments, like Russia — that are designed to sway elections, rile up discontent and cause strife and division.
In the face of all that, for a social media company to dismantle its best defense is the height of recklessness and irresponsibility.
2024 election was ‘tipping point’
Facebook employed a team of nearly 100 third-party fact-checkers across the globe, including the Associated Press and ABC News. “The focus of the program is to “address viral misinformation — particularly clear hoaxes that have no basis in fact,” Facebook says — for now, at least — on its own website.
“Fact-checking partners prioritize provably false claims that are timely, trending and consequential,” the company says.
But no more, according to Zuckerberg. “Community notes similar to X,” he says, will replace the professionals — as if anything related to the cesspool that is now X, which has lost millions of users since Musk’s takeover and is expected to lose millions more, is worth emulating.
And why do this now?
“The recent elections feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech,” he told Fox & Friends on Tuesday. “So we’re going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies, and restoring free expression on our platforms.”
The irony is that Meta created its fact-checking apparatus after Donald Trump’s election win in 2016, when the company was roundly criticized for allowing unchecked political misinformation on its platform.
Trump was even banned from Facebook when the platform concluded his posts had helped foment the violence at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 2021. The restriction was lifted in 2023.
Now Zuckerberg seeks to mend fences with Trump.
“Zuck’s announcement is a full bending of the knee to Trump and an attempt to catch up to Musk in his race to the bottom,” Nina Jankowicz, a disinformation expert who is CEO of the American Sunlight Project, said on the social media platform Bluesky.
“Fact-checking was not a panacea to disinformation on FB but it was an important part of moderation,” she said. “Bumpers are fully off the lane now.”
A disservice to users
For Meta to rely on users to annotate posts that are deemed false or wrong is hardly a trustworthy system. Are users really correcting a post, or just providing a counterpoint that’s also false? The result is less likely to bring clarity to users — many of whom rely largely or even solely on their social media feeds for news — as opposed to muddying the waters even further with harmful misinformation.
Even Zuckerberg admitted the likelihood of more “bad stuff” winding up in his platforms now — only to cavalierly dismiss it as a “trade-off. It means that we’re going to catch less bad stuff, but we’ll also reduce the number of innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally take down.”
That’s not a trade-off. That’s an abdication of duty. And frankly, an admission that Meta, the final arbiter, couldn’t do its job to tell when posts and accounts should, or should not, be taken down.
Zuckerberg’s cozying up to Trump benefits the incoming president and his political supporters — and perhaps Meta’s bottom line by remaining in their good graces, though we’d argue it could very well end up devaluing the platforms, if users flee when they start seeing more posts with crackpot ideas and bad information.
The one sure thing about Zuckerberg’s move: It does a great disservice to social media consumers — and to the larger cause of truth.
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The Sun-Times welcomes letters to the editor and op-eds. See our guidelines.