Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced that the company’s social media sites—Facebook, Instagram, and Threads—will cease the use of third-party fact-checking services. Instead, it will rely on user-submitted ‘community notes’ to label misleading or false information.
This feature debuted on Twitter under the old leadership in 2021, but only became widespread in 2023, after Elon Musk’s takeover and rebranding to X. Community notes can be rated by other users as helpful or not helpful. It is recorded how many of a community note contributor’s notes are rated helpful or not.
Elon Musk was a vocal supporter and major donor to Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign. Adopting a feature popularized on his platform is generally viewed as a shift to the right in the social media tech industry. And it is not the only sign that suggests that Zuckerberg is moving to the right.
‘Adopting a feature popularized on X is generally viewed as a shift to the right’
Earlier this month, he elected UFC CEO Dana White, another major supporter of Trump, to Meta’s Board of Directors; and promoted Republican policy executive Joel Kaplan to global affairs head in the company. Furthermore, Meta has donated $1 million to Donald Trump’s inauguration fund.
In his announcement, Zuckerberg also stated that he feels that there had been ‘too much censorship’ on Meta platforms, which is quite a striking admission. This also likely means that in addition to ditching fact-checkers, Meta will remove less ‘problematic’ content as well.
There have been some egregious cases of censorship on Facebook in the past.
For example, in August 2020, in the midst of the George Floyd riots, they banned all posts positive towards Kyle Rittenhouse, but allowed negative ones to stay on the platform. Rittenhouse was a 17-year-old boy who shot three people, killing two and severely injuring one, during the riots in Kenosha, Wisconsin. He has always maintained that he acted in self-defence, and he was in imminent danger of death or great bodily harm by violent rioters when he decided to shoot. A jury of his peers eventually agreed with him, and acquitted him on all charges in November 2021. Facebook at the time, however, rendered its own verdict prematurely, and further victimized a victim of a violent series of attacks.
Social Media Shifting Right?
These new developments on Meta platforms are in sharp contrast with how the same company treated President Trump four years ago, when they suspended him from all their platforms in January 2021 in the wake of the Capitol riots. During the 2020 election, Zuckerberg also donated $400 million of his personal wealth to the Democrat ‘get out to vote’ operation in Wisconsin.
In the broader picture, it seems that the liberal elite are losing their grip on the public information flow.
Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter in October 2022 was a major breakthrough on this issue already, as it broke the liberal stronghold on the leadership of all major social media companies. Unfavourable market conditions at the time also forced these companies to cater to a wider customer base, so they had to cut back on banning users and moderating content.
The reelection of Donald Trump, evidently, only exacerbated the problem for them. The ratings for left-leaning cable news channels CNN and MSNBC collapsed after the November election in the United States; while that of right-leaning Fox News and Newsmax rose. Fox News had already dominated cable TV before the election, now their lead and influence have grown even more.
‘It seems that the liberal elite are losing their grip on the public information flow’
With Meta also moving away from liberal influence, and Elon Musk’s X openly defying it, the new media seems to be slipping away from global liberal forces. It was Democratic lawmakers in the US and liberal lawmakers in Europe who were constantly pushed for more fact-checking and content censorship on these platforms, evidently assuming that they would be the ones judging what information was true or false, and what content was allowed or censored.
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