ECHO, 8 January 2024:
Coinciding with the return of Donald Trump to the US presidency, Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp has announced it’s abandoning the independent fact-checking processes set up in 2016 in favour of a ‘community notes’ program, as used on Elon Musk’s X platform, where the community decides which posts are misleading or need more context.
Meta’s press release quotes a 2019 speech by its CEO Mark Zuckerberg in which he argued that free expression has been the driving force behind progress in American society and around the world, and that inhibiting speech, however well-intentioned the reasons for doing so, reinforces existing institutions and power structures instead of empowering people.
‘Some people believe giving more people a voice is driving division rather than bringing us together, said Mr Zuckerberg.
‘More people across the spectrum believe that achieving the political outcomes they think matter is more important than every person having a voice. I think that’s dangerous.’
How did that work out?
In practice, Meta’s policies and role in fuelling misinformation led to the earlier election of Donald Trump in the USA, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, and the success of Brexit in the UK.
As Meta sought to rebuild its credentials as a good corporate citizen following the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which Facebook data was manipulated and exploited for political purposes in the UK and elsewhere (without the permission of users), independent fact checking was one of Meta’s responses.....
The statement goes on to say, ‘We want to undo the mission creep that has made our rules too restrictive and too prone to over-enforcement. We’re getting rid of a number of restrictions on topics like immigration, gender identity and gender that are the subject of frequent political discourse and debate....
Trumped
Meta’s latest press release doesn’t mention Donald Trump anywhere, but his influence is clearly apparent on the new direction of the company.
After clashing with Mr Trump earlier, Mark Zuckerberg has grown increasingly close to the incoming president in recent years, along with his fellow billionaires, notably Jeff Bezos, with significant implications for global media and information and eco-systems.
Donald Trump praised Meta’s latest announcement. ‘I think they’ve come a long way,’ he told a press conference yesterday. When a journalist asked the President-elect if he thought Zuckerberg was responding to threats he had made in the past, Trump responded with one word: ‘Probably’.
While the changes at Meta will only affect the United States initially, they are expected to be rolled out globally in the near future, including Australia.
Read the full article at
https://www.echo.net.au/2025/01/meta-abandons-independent-fact-checking/.
The question that immediately springs to mind - 'Will Zuckerberg remove the fact-checking function from the Australian version of Facebook ahead of the 2025 federal general election?'.
Due to the 2024 electoral redistribution, more than half of the 150 federal electorates will be going to the polls with altered electorate boundaries and, it is not hard to imagine that all political parties as well as third party lobbyists will begin campaigning vigorously in those seats in particular when the timing of this year's election is announced.
CNN Business, 8 January 2025:
New York CNN
Meta’s surprise decision to scrap its fact-checking partnerships – blindsiding journalists involved in the program and putting some out of work – is part of a much bigger shift in media and politics.
The very notion of fact-checking is under assault by a wide array of fact-challenged politicians and interest groups. Particularly on the right, “fact-check” has been turned into a dirty word, one that presupposes the fact-checker is actually suppressing some inconvenient truth.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg played right into that assumption on Tuesday when he insulted fact-checkers as “too politically biased” and said they “have destroyed more trust than they’ve created, especially in the U.S.”
Destroyed trust among whom, exactly? Zuckerberg didn’t say. But President-elect Donald Trump, who keeps fact-checkers busy and hates being corrected by them, welcomed Meta’s changes. So did the wide world of pro-Trump media. “Trump gets results,” Fox’s Laura Ingraham said Tuesday night, touting Meta’s “major shakeup.”
As CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan found through his interviews with Trump rallygoers, MAGA loyalists bristled at the existence of fact-checks on Facebook and objected to content moderation that they described as censorship. They trusted Trump over any attempt to fact-check him.
But for a wider audience, Meta’s support for outside fact-checking outlets helped make the internet a little bit less polluted by lies and propaganda.....
“Without fact checking on Meta, disinfo spreaders will be partying like it’s 2016,” said Duke [former CNN journalist Alan Duke, Lead Stories] .....
