Meta pivots to community fact-checking ahead of Trump term
This week, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerburg announced some big changes to content moderation strategy. The parent company of Facebook, Instagram, Threads and WhatsApp will no longer be contracting with third-party fact-checkers from the media and nonprofits as it has since 2016.
Instead, Meta will follow the lead of X under Elon Musk and rely on crowd-sourced Community Notes to provide additional context on posts.
Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with David Gilbert, a reporter at Wired who covers online disinformation and extremism, to learn more about Meta’s latest pivot.
David Gilbert: According to Meta’s announcement, it’s going to end its third-party fact-checking partnerships with the 10 organizations and newsrooms that it had partnered with in the U.S. And so that means that come March, as far as I understand, they will no longer be looking at content on Facebook, on Instagram, on Threads that they had been up until now fact-checking. Meta has not been clear in terms of whether it will extend that ban to third-party fact-checkers globally, but the indications are that if it works in the U.S. and the new system that it brings in works properly, then the likelihood is that it will expand the ban and end its partnerships across the globe.
Meghan McCarty Carino: Why does it seem like Meta is making this move now? I guess there’s kind of the text and the subtext here. Unpack that for us.
Gilbert: Yeah, there’s a lot going on. It says that it is ending the partnership because it believes that it was effectively forced into creating this system by the legacy media, which Mark Zuckerberg specifically blamed for kind of creating this atmosphere where people believed that there was so much disinformation on Meta’s platforms that they had to implement this system. And then he also blamed the fact-checkers themselves, complaining that they had become too politically biased, something that the fact-checking organizations themselves have strongly pushed back against. He said that the fact-checking network, or fact-checking system, had created too much censorship. I guess the subtext here is that over the last couple of months, we’ve seen Mark Zuckerberg and Meta kind of look to the new administration, the Trump administration that’s coming in, and take steps to what appears to be appeasing them. So we’ve seen Mark Zuckerberg dining in Mar-a-Lago with Donald Trump just before Thanksgiving. We’ve seen him donate a million dollars to the inauguration fund. We’ve seen them appoint last week Joel Kaplan as their policy chief, who was a former Republican operative who worked in the George W. Bush White House. And just this week, we saw Dana White appointed to the Meta board.
McCarty Carino: Dana White from the Ultimate Fighting Championship.
Gilbert: Yeah, Dana White, the UFC CEO who spoke at Trump’s victory speech on election night. So he’s a very close ally to Donald Trump. And when Trump was specifically asked about this Tuesday during his press conference, and asked whether the decision was taken because of pressure he had put on Mark Zuckerberg, Trump said, “probably.”
McCarty Carino: Let’s talk about what is coming in place of third-party fact-checking, and that is essentially the system that X has created with its Community Notes model. Can you explain how this works on X?
Gilbert: Community Notes is this idea where everyone and anyone who uses the platform can sign up to become a member, a volunteer, and they are then tasked with monitoring the platform and the posts that are on the platform. And they can either, firstly, propose a Community Note if they see a post that they believe is inaccurate or contains hate speech or contains inaccuracies, they can make a post and then ask the other members to vote on that. And the way X describes it is that you kind of have to get a bipartisan group of volunteers to agree that a post should be shown to the public before it’s actually made public. And that really is the problem, because I’m a member of the Community Notes group, and I see the notes that aren’t published, and all you see, typically, is just endless arguments about who’s right and who’s wrong. There’s very little agreement, and that’s why the amount of Community Notes that you’ll see publicly on the X feed is pretty minuscule. The way it’s described so far, it sounds as if it’s going to be identical to X, so it’s hard to see how it’s going to work any better on Facebook or Instagram or Threads than it has been working on X so far.
McCarty Carino: X has touted some independent studies that academic researchers have done on the Community Notes system, showing that notes are more trusted than generic labels, that they do cut down on the diffusion of posts that do receive community notes by 61%. You know, a study showed that they were effectively combating vaccine misinformation. Tell me more from your reporting and your experience what the drawbacks of this system are.
Gilbert: Well, I think if you spend any time on X, you’ll see that the content that is promoted heavily in your feed is content that is designed to be engaging and “clickbaity” and not necessarily full of facts. And when you speak to people who are involved in the Community Notes program, they kind of talk about this frustration of every time they try and post something, especially if it’s a blue-check account that has interacted with Elon Musk in the past, and they try and fact-check that, all you will get is a reply saying “NNN,” which means no notes needed, claiming that the proposed Community Note is invalid, and even if it cites verifiable sources and experts, they just dismiss it because they feel you’re attacking the person who posted the original post. And this is very much what happens under every single Elon Musk post. And that army of kind of partisan users is one of the major issues with the Community Note system on a platform like X, where they can be rallied to very quickly move against one or another person, and therefore it’s very hard to get accurate and timely notes posted on disinformation on a platform like X.
McCarty Carino: Yeah, I saw some data from the Center for Countering Digital Hate that I think less than 10% of proposed notes are actually posted, and it takes an average of 11 hours for them to post for those that do.
Gilbert: Yeah, that’s one of the biggest issues with Community Notes, is that the amount of arguments that are happening in the background around Community Notes means that when a Community Note is put up publicly, the post that it’s on is already gone viral and being seen by tens of millions of people, and therefore the note is really ineffective.
McCarty Carino: Are there models where crowd-sourced moderation has worked? I mean, I think a lot of people have pointed in the past to say, platforms like Wikipedia that have sort of successfully, I think, been perceived to use the crowd-sourced model.
Gilbert: Yeah, absolutely. And I think it definitely has worked in part, at least on Reddit, as well and Bluesky, which is kind of an alternative to X that has grown popular. They’ve even proposed using a Community Notes model, but very specifically for tackling harassment and kind of dog-piling on threads, not broad efforts to stop disinformation spreading on platform, but very specific, targeted effort to stop harassment on the platform. And I think that’s maybe where it could work best, is if you have this where users are doing a very specific job, not broadly replacing trust and safety teams and content moderators, which X has done and which Facebook seem to be moving towards, where they are replacing people with vast expertise and lots of years of tackling this problem and replacing it with users. And typically, what we see in a lot of cases is that the people who use it most are the people who have an agenda or an ax to grind against someone or some particular viewpoint, and therefore they’re going to use it as a way of suppressing some views and boosting others.
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