“Meta has become a home for Russian, Chinese, and Iranian disinformation,” said Gordon Crovitz, co-CEO of NewsGuard, a company that provides tools for evaluating the trustworthiness of online information. “Now, Meta seems to have decided to open the floodgates.” Again, fact-checking is not perfect; Croviz said that NewsGuard has tracked several “false narratives” on the Meta platform. And the community notes the model that Meta will replace. its fact-checking battalion can still be somewhat effective But research from Mahavedan and others has shown that crowdsourced solutions miss swaths of a lot of misinformation And unless Meta does maximum transparency on how versions are implemented and used, it is impossible to know that the system works. concerned, because it seemed to be absent in the first place. be biased toward conservatives,” said David Rand, a behavioral scientist at MIT. “There’s no good evidence for that.” In a paper recently published in Nature, Rand and his colleagues found that Twitter users who use Trump-related hashtags in 2020 are more than four times more likely to be suspended than those who use the pro-Biden hashtag, they are also more likely to share “low-quality” or misleading news,” Rand said. “The crowd ratings can do a really good job of generating fact-checking ratings … You’re still going to see more conservatives get punished than liberals.” And while X is getting more attention thanks to Musk, keep in mind that it’s an order of magnitude smaller than Facebook’s 3 billion monthly active users, which will present its own challenges when Meta installs its own community notes style system. “There’s a reason there’s only one Wikipedia in the world,” Matzarlis said. “It’s very hard to get crowdsourced anything from the ground on a scale.” As for the loosening of Meta’s Hateful Action policy, which itself is a political choice. It still allows some things and disallows others; moving those boundaries to accommodate bigotry doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. It just means that Meta is more OK with it than the day before. So much depends on exactly how the Meta system will work in practice. But between moderate changes and improvements to community guidelines, Facebook, Instagram, and Threads are moving closer to a world where anyone can say that gay and trans people have “mental illness,” where AI slop will evolve more aggressively, where outrageous claims . spread unchecked, where truth itself is easily formed. You know: like X.
