The rise and fall of "fact-checking" - by Nate Silver
On Tuesday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a series of changes to Facebook and Instagram that will considerably dial down the level of content moderation on those platforms. As someone who tries to be non-hypocritically pro-free speech, my inclination is to welcome the changes. But Zuck’s motivations are questionable: there’s no doubt that Meta and other media companies are under explicit and intense political pressure from the incoming Trump administration. So perhaps it’s the right move for the wrong reasons.
Just so that this doesn’t turn into another 5,000-word monster of a post, I’m going to focus solely on the first of five new policies that Zuckerberg announced. Here it is in his own words:
First, we're going to get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with community notes similar to X starting in the US. After Trump first got elected in 2016, the legacy media wrote nonstop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy. 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 US. So, over the next couple of months, we're going to phase in a more comprehensive community notes system.
So, the news is that Facebook is eliminating a partnership that began in December 2016 with independent fact-checking organizations and replacing them with a Twitter/X style Community Notes program.
