Facebook are Dropping Fact Checking!

As if the digital world couldn’t get any more chaotic, Meta’s boss, Mark Zuckerberg, has announced that Facebook and Instagram will be dropping fact checking.

According to the BBC, Meta’s chief executive said that third-party moderators were allegedly “too politically biased” and that he’d be effectively following the Elon Musk doctrine at X, formerly Twitter, of “free speech absolutism”; his exact words were that he said it was “time to get back to our roots over free expression.”

Will Facebook to go X/Twitter’s Way?

When Elon Musk took over at Twitter, after initially backing out of the deal and then being forced to stump up the $44 billion purchase price or be sued, one of the first things he did was purge a lot of staff.

First firing the top team of the CEO, CLO, CFO and General Counsel, the billionaire then laid off nearly 80% of Twitter’s employees, including a guy that I know. Developers and content moderation roles were key roles that were axed, but Musk also shed design, sales, marketing, legal, and HR teams.

It wasn’t even handled particularly well either. In the rush to save money and cut costs, many staff were simply locked out of their company systems overnight. Musk’s clumsy handling resulted in numerous lawsuits. There are still ongoing lawsuits, primarily concerned with the severance pay and the manner in which the roles were terminated. Remember, this was over two years ago – Musk completed his acquisition of Twitter back in October 2022.

With Meta, Zuckerberg is following the X/Twitter route and establishing a system of “Community Notes”. These are user-generated and, having contributed to them myself, it’s been an interesting journey. Obvious parody you can laugh at, but there are still users who challenge the content. NNN or “no note needed” often appears even when users simply disagree with each other. The notes system is supposed to be democratic and thus, if a note is popular, it becomes canon.

However, the biggest challenge with X/Twitter is that is now largely regarded as a “right wing” platform. So if Zuckerberg thinks moderators are “politically biased” then removing these people creates more of the same problem, if not worse.

Too Politically Biased

Anyway, what did he mean by “too politically biased”? I’ve never had an issue with Facebook’s moderation policies. If it keeps misleading, offensive, inflammatory, misogynistic, and racist commentary off the platform, then that’s a good thing.

However, by following Elon Musk’s path, isn’t this a deviation of Zuckerberg from the centre towards the right? Is “free speech absolutism” the allowance of all the negatives? And then we’re supposed to make our own minds up? By which time a post could have spread like wildfire across the internet and mislead or influenced hundreds, thousands, if not millions of impressionable minds.

I don’t want my child to see negative content. I know she’s only 12 but kids have a way of bypassing safeguards, and if these are lowered even further then it’s going to be easier for good people to see bad things.

And besides, aren’t good people going to be ever so slightly politically motivated? If racism is a right wing thing then surely defending against that is going to indicate a centrist or leftist stance?

The Impact For Users

I’m concerned that my timeline will fill up with all the wrong types of content. I see my friends posting on Facebook but I get a lot of random stuff on there these days too, Basically, I “broke the algorithm” by hardly using FB last year. What that’s done is now fill up my feed with about 80% posts from groups I don’t know and 20% from friends and family. Because I haven’t engaged with my peer group so much over the past 12 months, Facebook is trying to show me what it thinks is relevant. Some of it is, a lot of it is not.

Also, FB is personal for me. I want to see posts and content from people I know and then only from select businesses and groups. What I have now is a bit chaotic to be honest.

Facebook needs to be a fun and friendly place. I fear that any proliferation of “free speech” could just be an excuse for hateful and extreme opinions to flourish. I’ve already seen that on X/Twitter and I’m starting to see that on Facebook too. People I know with dubious right wing opinions are becoming more vocal. They’re emboldened by the rise of the likes of Farage, Trump, and Musk.

The Impact for Businesses

As a business owner myself, again, Facebook’s direction concerns me. If I were to advertise on FB, for myself or for other companies, I would be concerned about where my ads are placed. I would not want an honest advert for a genuine product or service positioned adjacent to some negative posts, I just don’t want the association of that.

And I’m far from being the only person too. Remember Elon Musk’s profanity-strewn outburst at The New York Times’ Dealbook Summit back in November 2023? The event is an all-day session of interviews with influential members of the business, political, and cultural sectors. Musk, interviewed by Ross Sorkin, was questioned about his own anti-Semitic posts on X/Twitter and the backlash from advertisers who were boycotting his platform. Musk’s response to those advertisers was “Go f**k yourselves!” And he didn’t say it just the once either,

When you have such immature and adolescent tantrum’s from a so-called “captain of industry” then it’s no wonder advertisers want to keep their brands away from such toxic environments. If Facebook goes down the same slippery slope, then it could face the same backlash too.

The Moderation Motivation

The biggest question in all this is why is Mark Zuckerberg doing this?

It can’t be because it’s too costly. Meta makes millions from ad revenue so it’s not about the money, is it?

Then there’s the time that Donald Trump threatened Zuckerberg would “…spend the rest of his life in prison…” if he cheated in the Presidential Election in 2024, despite there being conspiracies that Trump and Musk somehow cheated this time around.

Whatever the reason, the Meta CEO has pivoted far too quickly, seemingly in fear of the incoming Trump administration and almost ready to do their bidding. Do they have “dirt” on him?

Giving Up Security for Freedom?

The Benjamin Franklin quote about security and freedom often crops up in situations like these:

Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.

The original quote from a letter in 1755 was about taxation and defence funding, not government oversight and civil liberties as it used today.

But that’s where we are, sort of. If we give up the safety, of moderation, then there’s a sudden free for all, the liberty. Yet “freedom of speech”, whilst a noble concept, is littered with the potential to be perverted, like all things. Freedom of speech should not be a juvenile “I’ll do what I want”, that’s what undisciplined children do,

Freedom is an interesting thing. If we were all allowed to do what we want, then anything would be OK. Theft, vandalism, thuggery, and even murder would only be people exercising their freedoms, right? Well, that’s what laws are for, and the erosion of the rule of law is dangerous.

In today’s context, giving up the freedom to air damaging and destructive opinions is worth it for the protection of others. Not too much though. Or is that me being “too politically biased”?

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