Meta investigates fact-checkers ahead of Trump’s second term

“Facebook has already contributed to the destruction of journalism, and this will be the final nail in the coffin,” Nina Jankowicz, a former disinformation czar in the Biden administration who is now CEO of the American Sunlight Project, said in an email. “Newsrooms get grants from Facebook for fact-checking. That money allows them to do other journalism. Zuckerberg’s statement is an attempt to bow to Trump and catch up with Musk in his race. Fact-checking was not a panacea for misinformation on Facebook, but it was an important part of moderation.

In what he tried to frame as a bid to eliminate bias, Zuckerberg said Meta’s internal trust and security team would move from California to Texas, which is now home to X’s headquarters. “As we work to promote free speech, I think this will help us build confidence to do this work in places where there is less concern about bias from our teams,” Zuckerberg said.

X alternative BlueSky announced last August it’s also considering introducing a Community Notes-style feature to specifically address “dog stacking and other forms of harassment.” The feature is not yet available.

Like X, the Meta approach will use an army of volunteers to write community notes on posts, but for those posts to be visible to all users, other volunteers will have to vote to approve the note. “Like they did in X, Community Notes will require agreement between people with different perspectives to avoid biased ratings,” Kaplan said.

“We’ve seen this approach work on X, where they empower their community to decide whether posts are potentially misleading and need more context, and people from different perspectives decide what context is useful to other users.” Kaplan wrote.

But Community Notes on X, which first launched in 2021 as BirdWatch, has been repeatedly shown to be unable to curb the misinformation and hate speech that dominates the platform. adds to the problem.

Zuckerberg, who recently visited Trump at Mar-a-Lago and brought the president-elect the company’s new AR glasses, also accused lawmakers in Europe and Latin America of over-censoring and stifling free speech.

“We will work with President Trump to push back against governments around the world that are going after US companies and trying to impose more censorship,” Zuckerberg said.

But critics of Zuckerberg and Meta were quick to criticize these policy changes. “Meta’s announcement today is a departure from any sane and safe approach to content moderation” Real Facebook Control BoardThe activist group was formed in response to Meta’s creation of its own supervisory board, the statement said.

“Censorship is a manufactured crisis, a political ploy to signal that Meta platforms are open for business for far-right propaganda. Twitter’s lack of fact-checking has turned the platform into a cesspool; Zuckerberg joins them in the race to the bottom.”