The X-ification of Meta | WIRED

“Meta has been home to Russian, Chinese and Iranian disinformation for years,” claimed Gordon Crovitz, co-CEO of NewsGuard, a company that provides a tool for assessing the trustworthiness of online information. “Now, Meta has apparently decided to fully open the floodgates.”

Again, fact-checking is not perfect; Croviz said that NewsGuard has already tracked several “false narratives” on the Metar platform. And the community notes model with which Meta will replace its fact-checking battalions may still be somewhat viable. but Research Mahabedan et al have shown that crowdsourced solutions miss a large amount of misinformation. And until Meta promises maximum transparency in how its version is implemented and used, it’s impossible to know if the systems are working at all.

It’s also unlikely that switching to community notes will solve the “bias” problem meta-executives are so outwardly concerned about that it seems unlikely to exist in the first place.

“The impetus for all of these changes in Matt’s policy and Twitter’s takeover of Masks is this accusation that social media companies are biased against conservatives,” said David Rand, a behavioral scientist at MIT. “There is no good evidence for this.”

In a recently published report paper In Nature, Rand and her co-authors found that while Twitter users who used Trump-related hashtags in 2020 were four times more likely to eventually be suspended than users of pro-Biden hashtags, they were also much more likely to share “low-quality” or misleading news.

“Just because there’s a difference in who’s being acted upon, that doesn’t mean there’s bias,” Rand says. “Crowd ratings can do a pretty good job of reproducing fact-checker ratings … you’re still going to see more conservatives approved than liberals.”

And while X gets attention in part because of Musk, remember that it’s an order of magnitude smaller than Facebook’s 3 billion monthly active users, which will present its own challenges when Meta installs its own community notes-style system. “There’s a reason there’s only one Wikipedia in the world,” Matzerlis said. “It’s very difficult to get anything crowdsourced at scale out of the field.”

As for the relaxation of Meta’s Hateful Conduct policy, this is itself an implicit political choice. It is still allowing some things and disallowing others; Moving these boundaries to accommodate bigotry doesn’t mean they don’t exist. This means that the meta is more okay with it than it was back in the day.

Much depends on how the mater system will work in practice. But amid moderation changes and community guidelines overhauls, Facebook, Instagram, and Threads are focusing on a world where one can say that gay and trans people “mental illness,” where AI slop will expand ever more aggressively, where outrageous claims proliferate uncontrollably, where truth itself is malleable.

You know: just like x.