As Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta which is the parent company of Instagram, Facebook, and Threads faces a new flow of policy from President Elect, Donald Trump entering office, a huge fluctuation of political content is overflowing on social media and Zuckerberg feels like action was required.
“After Trump got elected in 2016,” Zuckerberg states in a video. “Legacy media wrote nonstop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy” as he claimed in his virtual address on this issue.
As he plans to remove these “Fact Checkers” he plans to instead let the community have a say in the matter similar to Elon Musk’s platform, X (formerly known as Twitter).
“We are going to get rid of Fact-Checkers and replace them with Community Notes,” he proclaimed. “The Fact-Checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust they have created, especially in the U.S.”
These “Fact Checkers” are a third party artificial intelligence system used to dive into the web and the news to make an “informed guess” on how accurate the information on these social media platforms are.
However, the new aim of this Community Notes system is, “to create a better informed world by empowering people collaboratively to add context to misleading posts (X)” as claimed by Musk’s platform.
Zuckerberg plans to implement this in a more hands off manner because he feels like on his platforms his current policies in place ‘restrict free speech’.
“The problem with complex systems is that they make mistakes, even if they accidentally censor just 1 percent of posts, that’s millions of people,” he said. “It is getting to the point where there are just too many mistakes and too much censorship.”
Zuckerberg highlights these changes made to his platforms as a political change made because he believes the government keeps restricting free speech.
The huge concern from the absence of these fact checkers and this overall looser nature of the platform that is being taken is really leaving the public standing completely in the hands of the users. Which to most, are in good standing however, not everyone has good intentions with power like this.
As the power of these major social media platforms shifts to ‘looser’ policies and ‘restores speech’ to the people who use them, the current status of social media as a whole plans to make a more user operated platform, not artificially operated.
However, as a person and a Journalist, I believe that this stance taken by Zuckerberg is completely irrational and not dealt with the correct way because this could in turn lead to even more misinformation.
With the presence of fact checkers alone misinformation to a degree was being ultimately halted but also, actually being formally dealt with.
On this topic I view free speech not really being violated in the least because on Meta’s various selection of social media platforms, a huge portion of this information could be intentionally false on purpose for a funny joke, an AI edit, or plenty of other different types of ideas. Of this “1% of users” gets tagged for misinformation, out of that one-million users, most are explicitly typing to post misinformation for social appeal and entertainment.
Though the topic does get controversial when it comes to those who are genuinely trying to post genuine information and it gets flagged by fact checkers as “false” then I see the issue that Zuckerberg is trying to highlight, but I would completely put faith in a artificially intelligent system that searches the whole web to highlight something as false rather than the community because quite literally from a Meta perspective, this “hands-off” management of his platforms is lazy.
Because overall, I would rather have a robot accidentally get something wrong instead of a person who is trying to intentionally misinform the public.
