Frying pan to dumpster fire? Meta chucks fact-checkers to become a Trump-et

Facebook and Instagram owner Meta said Tuesday, 7 January, that it is scrapping its third-party fact-checking programme and replacing it with a Community Notes programme written by users — similar to the model used by Elon Musk's social media platform X.

Starting in the US, Meta will end its fact-checking programme with independent third parties. The company said it decided to end the programme because expert fact-checkers had their own biases and too much content ended up being censored.

Instead, Meta will now pivot to a Community Notes model.

“We’ve seen this approach work on X — where they empower their community to decide when posts are potentially misleading and need more context,” Meta's chief global affairs officer Joel Kaplan said in a blog post, in a rare acknowledgement of Elon Musk getting it ‘right’ (pun very much intended in this case, because... read on!).

Kaplan — only incidentally, we're sure — leans Republican, and recently replaced Nick Clegg, who ran in the Lib Dem direction.

The social media company also said plans to allow “more speech” by lifting some restrictions on some topics that are part of mainstream discussion in order to focus on illegal and “high severity violations” like terrorism, child sexual exploitation and drugs.

Meta said that its approach of building complex systems to manage content on its platforms has “gone too far” and has made “too many mistakes” and censored too much content.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged that the changes are in part sparked by of Donald Trump's presidential election victory.

“The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritising speech,” Zuckerberg said in the online video.

He also spoke of the importance of the US government’s support — specifically Trump’s, versus US governments that pushed for more censorship — in addressing how “other governments” globally have suppressed “US companies” and voices.

Certain kinds of censorship, then, seem not only to be okay but welcome and will grow in future.

Zuckerberg promises, in fact, to “work with President Trump to push back against foreign governments going after American companies to censor more”.

Should Indian users be worried? It might depend on how pro-America and right-wing they are, perhaps. It certainly sounds like those kinds of voices would benefit, their content allowed more ‘freedom’ to thrive and be amplified.

Intriguingly, Elon Musk had once called Trump’s own social media app Truth Social a “right-wing echo chamber” and “Trumpet” — and has since done a volte face last year to endorsing him and being invited to join the new dispensation in some guiding capacity that has many a netizen petrified.

And it was under Musk that X (then Twitter) had rolled back is Covid misinformation policy, declaring in no uncertain terms that the 21st century is a post-truth millennium.

Amazon and Google too have since 2023 had mass layoffs of team that specifically had as their mandate fact checks and fighting hate. Microsoft too had laid off its entire ‘ethics and society’ team in 2022 — the same year that Zuckerberg too began his ‘efficiency’ project and Musk acquired Twitter, promptly letting go of all but one member of its ‘AI ethics’ team (that last person quit).

Various media houses have already begun to — cautiously or more audaciously — call out Meta’s latest moves for what they must really be... For journalists, both career and citizen, official and unofficial variants, are among the foremost losers in a no-holds-bar ‘free speech‘-unbounded space.

With PTI inputs