Meta will no longer use fact checkers to moderate content on Instagram and Facebook, the social media company announced Monday. The policy change is one of several measures to reaffirm the company’s commitment to free speech.
“In recent years, we’ve developed increasingly complex systems to manage content across our platforms, partly in response to societal and political pressure to moderate content,” Chief Global Affairs Officer Joel Kaplan wrote in the company’s official announcement. “This approach has gone too far.”
He continued:
Legacy media outlets and ousted fact checkers are not happy, particularly with CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s assertion that fact checkers were “too politically biased” and “destroyed more trust than they created.”
“I don’t believe we were doing anything, in any form, with bias,” Neil Brown, the president of the Poynter Institute, told The New York Times. “There’s a mountain of what could be checked, and we were grabbing what we could.”
Meta doesn’t deny Brown’s claim. Kaplan freely admits the company’s “complex [content management] systems” are too prone to censoring “harmless content.”
But that doesn’t make Brown and his compatriots any less complicit in Facebook’s censorship machine. Kaplan also observes that choosing “what [content] to fact check and how” allowed “experts” to impose their perspective on otherwise free conversations.
The ultimate fault, however, doesn’t lie with Brown or any individual fact checker alone, but with the assumption that “experts” can be reliable arbiters of truth.
The title of “fact checker” evokes images of objective experts correcting posts declaring obvious falsehoods, like “the sky is red” or “dolphins are reptiles.” But truth and lies are rarely so obvious — particularly on platforms as chaotic as social media. In practice, fact checkers spend most of their time in the subjective realm of interpretation and evaluation. Their limited assessments and inevitable biases and errors undeniably shape online discourse.
Let’s look at a couple examples.
Legacy media outlets claim Zuckerberg’s decision will cause dangerous “mis- and disinformation” to proliferate. But truth, while objective, is also multifaceted. Statements can include truth and falsehood, and can be interpreted differently depending on the reader’s own viewpoint and biases.
Consider this “lie” Vox references:
It’s true that Springfield police have never found explicit evidence that Haitian migrants ate pets. But at the time of the debate, police reports indicated Haitian migrants had taken a neighbor’s cat and geese from local parks. The cat was found alive and uneaten in the week following Trump’s statements. Reports of kidnapped geese remain.
Authenticated footage posted to social media in 2023 shows an African family barbequing two cats in Dayton.
Whether Trump exaggerated, manipulated or omitted crucial facts is still up for interpretation. We do know that pet consumption isn’t unheard of in Ohio. Authenticated footage posted to social media in 2023 shows an African family barbequing two cats in Dayton.
We also know that threats subsequently made against Springfield were not, as Vox seems to suggest, related to Trump’s statements. According to Ohio Governor Mike DeWine, most were hoaxes perpetrated by an unnamed foreign adversary.
Suffice to say, the truth is complicated — and that’s assuming people can decide what it is. More often than not, contentious social media discourse involves users arguing over which competing narratives are true.
For several years, Facebook has treated the belief that biological sex can — and should — be subverted in favor of a person’s “gender identity” as truth. Outlets like the Daily Citizen face censorship and demotion for questioning the veracity of this narrative and arguing that sex is immutable.
Vox warns that moving away from fact checkers allows “transphobic slurs” and “hate speech” to proliferate. In other words, reducing complex content moderation makes it less likely that users who question gender ideology will be censored.
This is a good thing. When social media sites flatten one or more competing narratives, they run the risk of squashing the truth.
And sometimes, the truth isn’t immediately obvious.
Vox contends that “dialing back moderation on topics like immigration and gender identity, which have already been the subject of rampant right-wing conspiracy theories, could exacerbate an existing mis- and disinformation problem.”
But, too often, those “right-wing conspiracy” theories prove to be true.
Remember the “COVID-19 lab leak” conspiracy? The “Hunter Biden laptop” conspiracy? The “President Biden’s mental acuity is declining” conspiracy? The “Southern Border isn’t secure” conspiracy? The “cross-sex hormones are bad for children” conspiracy?
I digress.
Fact-checkers are ill-equipped to unilaterally dictate truth. There’s no shame in that. Only God, in His infinite wisdom, can see all the shades, facets and dimensions of objective truth. The community notes model Meta intends to adopt, which allows users to make corrections or add necessary context in a separate field, uses crowdsourcing to better capture diverse perspectives and key context.
That doesn’t necessarily mean Facebook will become more trustworthy. Social media platforms make it easy for people to lie, manipulate and exaggerate. Knowing that, users must instead make a choice: Would you rather have access to more information, knowing that much of it may be untrue, offensive or incomplete? Or would you rather someone else filter out all the noise, knowing that important stories may be kept from you?
I am passionately in favor of the former. For those taken with the latter… read Orwell’s 1984 and get back to me.
Additional Articles and Resources
Politifact Seriously Muffs Their ‘2024 Lie of the Year’: It was Clearly the Media’s Cover-Up
Supreme Court Rejects Challenge to Government-Backed Social Media Censorship
Court Rules Government Violated First Amendment With Social Media Censorship
Taylor Swift Deepfakes Should Inspire Outrage — But X isn’t to Blame
The Twitter Files (Part 1) (Part 2)
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