A different approach was highlighted by Meta to online speech
The Right is On: Defending Free Expression through Third Party Fact-Checking and Community Notes on Meta, founder Mark Zuckerberg, and Cornell University
X seems like it should be a cautionary tale rather than a North Star for Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Advertisers and users alike have reportedly fled in droves since Musk took. Timelines are increasingly filled with far-right debate-me edgelord accounts that post a constant churn of misinformation. (And that’s just the owner.) Yet Meta has made clear that this is the future it wants.
Meta says the end of its third-party fact-checking program is a change it’s making “starting in the US.” In order to get away from third party fact-checking, the company is changing to a crowd-sourced model of Community Notes, styled after X, with less restriction on the negative things people can say on their platforms. Zuckerberg says this combined with other content moderation policy changes will make it so less content is inappropriately removed, a common complaint the right has been making for years, even if that means more unsavory (but legal) content stays up longer.
Alexios Matzarlis, director of the security, trust, and safety initiative at Cornell University, says he was expecting Meta to axe the program for years. This is nakedly political, and not in this manner, and with this timing.
Kaplan said that the fact-checking program and other efforts have expanded to the point that they are making too many mistakes and getting in the way of free expression. “We want to fix that and return to that fundamental commitment to free expression.”
Keller is worried that the rhetoric he put toward Europe could lead to European regulators going after US platforms for speech concerns. “He will offend them, and they’ll get their back up, and then they really will interpret it to give themselves broader powers and to be able to punish Meta more,” Keller says. He’s going to force them to become censors, because he claims they are now.
“The inflection point is Trump, and Facebook is just following along,” says Daphne Keller, director of the program on platform regulation at Stanford University’s Cyber Policy Center. Meta wants Trump to be involved in a fight with Europe. We are on your side. She says that they are pro-free speech.
Under Europe’s Digital Services Act, large platforms like Meta can be held accountable for failing to remove illegal content or that which violates their own terms of service in a timely manner once it’s reported, with fines as high as 6 percent of their annual global revenue. Meta says that under its changes, it will still take down illegal content but is loosening its approach on what’s sometimes referred to as “lawful but awful” content, such as likening women to “household objects.”
Others, like London School of Economics and Political Science associate law professor Martin Husovec, have said that fears that the DSA would turn the EU into a “Ministry of Truth are misplaced,” since even though there’s opportunity for abuse, the law is not “pre-programmed” to suppress lawful disinformation.
Is There a Way to Stop Bossing the TikTok App Store? An Update on Meta and its Implications for the US Supreme Court
Often, I’ll come across it as a comment on a video of a teenager on TikTok doing something that could easily be considered embarrassing, like singing out of key or obsessing over something others find cringe. That comment, word for word, on videos from people with disabilities is upsetting. The commenters say this because they believe that it is more difficult to be nasty on social media platforms. The subtext is that if these users posted to Reels instead of TikTok, they’d receive the harassment the commenters believe they deserve.
TikTok is staring down a nationwide ban this week. Mark Zuckerberg has made his platform more dangerous to appease the incoming president.
Kate Knibbs reported this week that the update to Meta’s Community Guidelines allowed users to make blatantly homophobic, transphobic, sexist and racist posts without consequences. For Platformer, Casey Newton noted that, lost amongst other changes, Meta removed a sentence from its guidelines “explaining that hateful speech can ‘promote offline violence.’” Doing so immediately following the anniversary of January 6 is truly something to behold!
The Supreme Court will also take up TikTok’s lawsuit against the US government and its attempts to ban the app nationwide. We are now less than two weeks out from the deadline for a sale or an extension, so the court doesn’t have a lot of time to save the app—if that’s even what it ends up doing.
