#Facebook Fact-Checking

[childrenofthedigitalage]

Meta's Content Moderation Changes: Why Ireland Must Act Now

Meta’s Content Moderation Changes: Why Ireland Must Act Now The recent decision by Meta to end third-party fact-checking programs on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Threads has sent shockwaves through online safety circles. For a country like Ireland, home to Meta’s European headquarters, this is more than just a tech policy shift—it’s a wake-up call. It highlights the urgent need for…

[saywhat-politics]

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a series of major changes to the company's moderation policies and practices, saying that the election felt like a "cultural tipping point."

Jan. 7, 2025, 5:05 AM MST / Updated Jan. 7, 2025, 6:04 AM MST

By Bruna Horvath, Jason Abbruzzese and Ben Goggin

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a series of major changes to the company's moderation policies and practices Tuesday, citing a shifting political and social landscape and a desire to embrace free speech.

Zuckerberg said that Meta will end its fact-checking program with trusted partners and replace it with a community-driven system similar to X’s Community Notes.

The company is also making changes to its content moderation policies around political topics and undoing changes that reduced the amount of political content in user feeds, Zuckerberg said.

The changes will affect Facebook and Instagram, two of the largest social media platforms in the world, each boasting billions of users, as well as Threads.

[tomorrowusa]

Zuck joins Musk in the fetid MAGA swamp.

[political-us]

Last Week Tonight with John Oliver -Facebook and Content Moderation

[originalleftist]

Ran across a Deppie post on Reddit, claiming Amber Heard's Instagram account had followed JD Vance.

They were of course spinning wild conspiracy theories, claiming it was some plot by her to get to Musk, etc. The usual bullshit.

Still, the basic claim seemed easy enough to fact-check. I logged into Instagram, checked Heard's follow list, and... yup. Vice President Vance.

Well, that was disheartening, to say the least. If she turned out to be yet another white person who went full Nazi, it wouldn't change my opinion of the trial- even bad people have rights, and can be abused, and her OpEd flatly wasn't defamatory by any reasonable definition. But it would have forced me to lower my estimation of her as a person considerably, and stop supporting her work.

Still, it seemed odd- Despite her past relationship with Musk (before he became openly fascist), her politics has been mostly Left-leaning for years, particularly on feminism and LGBTQ rights as well as voting rights. Vance seemed an out-character choice for her to follow.

And then it occurred to me.

A few weeks back I saw a post reminding people to unfollow the official POTUS, VP accounts, etc, because those accounts changed hands after the election. I checked my Facebook, and sure enough, I was unwittingly following the Orange Felon.

Heard followed Vice President Harris on Instagram. It got some mean-spirited media coverage gossiping about Harris not following her back. Sure enough, the Harris account is gone from her follows list. So, assuming she was following the official VP account, it may simply be that Amber Heard hasn't updated her Instagram follows since before Inauguration Day (she posts about twice a year now).

Which feels like a weird thing to know about someone I've never met, but also kind of humanizing, for lack of a better word- the sort of simple mistake that any regular person could make (myself included).

Anyway, this is your reminder for the day that:

a) You should check your social media post-election to make sure you aren't accidentally following Nazis now.

b) Most of what people say about Amber Heard is probably bullshit.

c) It never hurts to dig a little deeper with your fact-checking before jumping to conclusions. I could have just read the Reddit post, or hell just checked her Instagram page, and impulsively denounced her as a turncoat and a Nazi. I probably would have, if it had been someone else I hadn't spent the last three years publicly supporting.

(It also is possible, of course, that she's suddenly decided to follow Vance (and no other notable MAGA figures) for whatever reason. Vance is the top of her follow list, which might suggest a recent follow, but I really don't know how that works if an account you were following before changed hands, and Instagram's algorithm for ranking follows is... obscure. Nor would I put it past Meta to tweak the algorithm to boost Regime accounts, given how hard they've been sucking the Regime's dick lately (try posting the Felon's mugshot to Facebook if you want to see this in action- every time I do, Facebook falsely labels it an AI-generated image.))

[wardsutton]

My latest for today's Politico:

[afriblaq]

Bowing to Trump? Zuckerberg Ends Fact-Checking on His Platforms

Bowing to Trump? Zuckerberg Ends Fact-Checking on His Platforms

This is a clip from the Karen Hunter Show, which airs Monday-Friday 3-6 p.m. ET on SiriusXM. For more, go to https://player.siriusx..., sign up and search Karen Hunter Show.

siriusxm.us/KarenHunterShow

[josephtrohman]

06.22.2012

[saywhat-politics]

With policy rollbacks ahead of the inauguration, Meta capitulates to Trump and MAGA media’s false claims of censorship

WRITTEN BY KAYLA GOGARTY

PUBLISHED 01/07/25 6:32 PM EST

Before President-elect Donald Trump has even taken office, Meta is again capitulating to false right-wing claims of anti-conservative bias and censorship, announcing that it will end fact-checking and remove most content moderation from its platforms.

Both the substance of the changes and the messaging from Meta mirror — and are seemingly a direct appeal to — Trump and MAGA media, who have spent years claiming to be defenders of free expression and victims of censorship.

But Meta’s announcement omits two key facts: Right-leaning Facebook content has consistently outperformed left-leaning and nonaligned content, showing it’s not being censored. And previous gaps in content moderation have caused real-world harm, helping foment the January 6 insurrection, contributing to anti-LGBTQ sentiment, and fueling vaccine hesitancy.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Graeme Demianyk at HuffPost:

Mark Zuckerberg announced Meta is abandoning its fact-checking program as he criticized the system for becoming “too politically biased.” The tech billionaire unveiled the changes in a video on Tuesday. Zuckerberg said his companies — which include Facebook and Instagram — would instead implement a “community notes” model similar to the one used on X, which is owned by Elon Musk. The policy shift comes as tech companies attempt to curry favor with President-elect Donald Trump following the Republican’s election triumph in November. “After Trump first got elected in 2016, the legacy media wrote non-stop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy,” Meta’s chief executive said. “We tried, in good faith, to address those concerns without becoming the arbiters of truth, but the fact-checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created, especially in the U.S.” Starting in the U.S., Meta will end its fact-checking program with independent third parties and pivot to “community notes,” a system that relies on users adding notes or corrections to posts that may contain false or misleading information.

Zuckerberg also indicated a new direction on speech, announcing Meta will also “remove restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are out of touch with mainstream discourse.” “What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas,” Zuckerberg said. “And it’s gone too far. So I want to make sure that people can share their beliefs and experiences on our platforms.” He conceded that there would be more “bad stuff” on the platform as a result of the decisions. “The reality is that this is a trade-off,” he said.

[...] Zuckerberg also indicated a new direction on speech, announcing Meta will also “remove restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are out of touch with mainstream discourse.” “What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas,” Zuckerberg said. “And it’s gone too far. So I want to make sure that people can share their beliefs and experiences on our platforms.” He conceded that there would be more “bad stuff” on the platform as a result of the decisions. “The reality is that this is a trade-off,” he said.

Meta owner Mark Zuckerberg grossly caves into right-wing faux outrage campaign about conservatives being “silenced” by dumping fact-checkers for X-esque Community Notes and removing restrictions on anti-immigrant and anti-LGBTQ+/anti-trans speech. Adding right-wing UFC CEO Dana White to Meta’s board furthers the appeasement of Trump and radical right-wing Tech Bros.

See Also:

Daily Kos: Zuckerberg's Meta follows Musk's X into misinformation

The Guardian: Meta to get rid of factcheckers and recommend more political content

MMFA: Zuckerberg and Meta are done pretending to care about mitigating the harms their platforms cause

[tomorrowusa]

Don't expect to find facts any more on Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and other Zuck-owned social media.

Multibillionaire Mark Zuckerberg apparently wants to add even more loot to his enormous fortune. So he has increasingly been kissing up to Donald Trump.

Trump dwells in a universe where any content which contradicts him or disagrees with him is disparaged as "fake news". In such a space, fact checking is considered a hindrance to Trump's firehose of bullshit.

So getting rid of fact checking is a green light for conspiracy theorists, hate speech, and (of course) unsubstantiated Trump bullshit.

Meta is abandoning the use of independent fact checkers on Facebook and Instagram, replacing them with X-style "community notes" where commenting on the accuracy of posts is left to users. In a video posted alongside a blog post by the company on Tuesday, chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said third-party moderators were "too politically biased" and it was "time to get back to our roots around free expression". The move comes as Zuckerberg and other tech executives seek to improve relations with US President-elect Donald Trump before he takes office later this month. Trump and his Republican allies have criticised Meta for its fact-checking policy, calling it censorship of right-wing voices. Speaking after the changes were announced, Trump told a news conference he was impressed by Zuckerberg's decision and that Meta had "come a long way". Asked whether Zuckerberg was "directly responding" to threats Trump had made to him in the past, the incoming US president responded: "Probably".

It's time to get off of META (Facebook, etc.) as it is to get off Twitter/X.

Your presence there just makes broligarchs richer and feeds the Trump messaging machine.

Don't whine that you somehow need Facebook to keep in touch with friends. People had lasting friendships for hundreds of years before Zuck started Facebook to rate girls at Harvard. And people in pre-Facebook times had fewer worries about privacy.

And please don't spew the insipid line: "I don't click the ads there." Clicking ads is not the point. You are giving broligarch social media credibility just by being there. Without people like you, Facebook and Twitter/X are just clones of Truth Social.

Quitting META and Twitter/X in not just good politics and good for your privacy, it's excellent for your mental health.

Should You Leave Social Media?

[radipede]

roommate is fearmongering again i think

[lost-carcosa]

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Stephen Knight

Published: Jan 8, 2025

In entirely unexpected, but welcome news, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has just announced that Facebook and Instagram will now prioritise free expression.

Rather than simply pay lip service to the idea, Zuckerberg has outlined—in rather emphatic fashion—just exactly what he intends to do. You can watch the video below:

Some key points:

📌 'Fact-checkers' are too politically biased and will be replaced by a community notes function, similar to ‘X’.

📌 They are going to get rid of "out of touch" restrictions on discussing topics like 'immigration' and 'gender'.

📌 Political content will no longer have its visibility reduced.

📌 The trust and safety team will be moved from California to Texas to combat perception of political bias.

📌 They will work with President Trump to pushback on any foreign Governments that attempt to pressure American companies to censor content.

📌 Europe is noted for having "laws, institutionalizing censorship and making it difficult to build anything innovative there".

I always retain no small amount of cynicism when a large corporate entity pivots in this manner. I suspect it's less likely a new found commitment to principle, but rather an adjustment based on what is now good for business.

It seems the general public does not like to be told what they can say or think about certain issues, with ‘gender’ and ‘immigration’ being singled out here. It's now interesting to hear Zuckerberg essentially admit that his platform has been censoring people for what he now understands to be ‘mainstream’ opinions.

Either way, it cannot be denied that this is a very welcome development.

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By: Charles C. W. Cooke

Published: Jan 7, 2025

Today’s statement from Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta (which owns Facebook and Instagram, among other things), is a remarkable cultural artifact. If Zuckerberg means even half of what he says in it, we may well be seeing a genuine shift in how Silicon Valley regards free speech, dissent, and pluralism.

As NBC notes:

Zuckerberg said that Meta will end its fact-checking program with trusted partners and replace it with a community-driven system similar to X’s Community Notes.

But it is how this is to be done that is so interesting. In his address, Zuckerberg announced that his moderation teams would be moved from California to Texas; he mentioned “immigration” and “gender” as two topics on which those who enforce Meta’s rules had proven to be out of touch with the American middle; he suggested that “the recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards, once again, prioritizing speech”; and he distinguished between “social media” and “legacy media.” Indirectly referencing Blackstone, he concluded by accepting that “we’re going to catch less bad stuff, but we’ll also reduce the number of innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally take down.”

These are no weasel words. Nor can Zuckerberg wriggle out of them without his reversal being obvious. In essence, Zuckerberg just told his company and its peers that they are living in a censorious bubble, and that they are at serious risk of becoming exiles in the country they supposedly serve.

Certainly, some of what Zuckerberg said is the product of competition from Elon Musk’s X, and of a desire to stay on the right side of figures in both parties who would like to break up companies such as Meta. But that doesn’t change the fact that the pressure to which he’s responding is real, and nor does it make his description of his staff’s parochialism any less true. For more than a decade now, many people within both social media and “legacy media” have attempted to use their power to end debate on a host of important democratic issues. This has failed — and spectacularly so. Even if one regards Zuckerberg’s shift as a purely cynical surrender, performed by a malleable and amoral cipher, one ought to be pleased at the impetus that provoked it. Something is changing out there — and changing for the better.

[ Via: https://archive.today/yRfj4 ]

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