Meta Gets All The Wrong Lessons From X

“Meta has always been a home for Russian, Chinese and Iranian disinformation,” said Gordon Crovitz, CEO of NewsGuard, which provides a tool to assess the credibility of online information. “Now, it seems the Meta has decided to fully open the floodgates.”

Still, fact-checking isn’t perfect; Croviz says NewsGuard has already tracked several “false narratives” on Meta platforms. The community notes that the model that Meta will replace battalions of fact-checkers may still be somewhat effective. But research Research by Mahavedan et al showed that crowded solutions miss a large number of false positives. If Meta doesn’t follow maximum transparency in how its version is implemented and used, it won’t be possible to know if the systems work at all.

Given that the link to community notes is unlikely to exist in the first place, it’s also unlikely that it will solve the “bias” problem that the Meta execs seem to be worried about.

David Rand, a behavioral scientist at MIT, said, “The motivation behind all this shifting of Meta’s policies and Musk’s takeover of Twitter is the accusation that social media companies are biased against conservatives.” “There is no good evidence for this.”

In a recently published article paper In Nature, Rand and her co-authors found that while Twitter users who used a Trump-related hashtag in 2020 were more than four times more likely to be ultimately suspended than those who used pro-Biden hashtags, they were also more likely to share “low-quality” or confusing news.

“Just because there’s a difference in who takes action doesn’t mean there’s bias,” says Rand. “Crowd ratings can do a pretty good job of replicating fact-checker ratings … You’ll still see more conservatives sanctioned than liberals.”

While X is getting attention in part due to Mask, keep in mind that this is a smaller number than Facebook’s 3 billion monthly active users, and Meta will present its own challenges when it installs its own community notes-style system. “There’s a reason there’s only one Wikipedia in the world,” says Matzarlis. “It’s very difficult to get something crowded off the ground with an issue.”

As for relaxing Meta’s Hateful Conduct policy, that in itself is a political choice. It still permits some things and disallows others; changing these boundaries to accommodate bigotry does not mean they do not exist. It just shows that Meta is better than the day before.

Much depends on how the meta system will work in practice. But between moderation changes and an overhaul of community guidelines, Facebook, Instagram, and Threads are moving toward a world where anyone can say gay and trans people are “productive.”mental illness,” where the AI ​​bias will spread even more aggressively, where outrageous claims will spread unchecked, where truth itself is malleable.

You know: like X.