Research - 09.01.2025 - 11:30
What is behind Meta’s decision to end third party fact-checking?
What did Meta decide? How will this affect the reliability of information?
Mark Zuckerberg has revealed significant updates to Meta's content moderation approach. The company will discontinue its fact-checking initiative, remove certain speech restrictions that were previously deemed harmful, adjust automated moderation systems to focus on addressing only severe violations, among others. Overall, it is a drastic policy change which reduces checks and balances over toxic content and mis- and disinformation. The fact-checking program, in which media organizations partnered in over 100 countries, is being substituted, for the moment in the US only, by a new system which imitates X’s “Community Notes” that allows users to flag and rate content and its reliability.
Meta decided to follow a more relaxed approach to content moderation, which is entirely ispired by decisions Elon Musk took when acquiring the platform formely known as Twitter. While the discontinuation of the fact-checking program has been making more headlines and still remains huge news, I am afraid the most severe consequences will emerge from the removal of some of the restrictions on certain speech.
Notable adjustments have been made to Meta's "Hateful Conduct" policy, which addresses topics such as immigration and gender, among other areas, as Wired noted. This will inevitably allow misoginistic, racist and similar content to circulate more easily and will have a drastic impact in the lives of many.
Some see this as an attempt by Meta to cozy up to Trump or at least show that their platforms are not biased against conservatives in the USA. Is there some truth to this?
Totally. The Silicon Valley is going through a phase of political repositioning in favour of the incoming Trump administration. Elon Musk won the best seat of course, but all the other companies are trying to get a piece of the Mar-a-Lago cake. We should not forget Meta is the same company that banned Trump’s profiles from all its platforms following Capitol Hill violence on 6 Jan 2021. Four years later, Zuckerberg is using most of the Trump’s classic talking points to justify his decisions, which echoes positions and directly pulls themes from the US political right’s playbook. Silicon Valley has always been a power-seeking entity and they’re now obviously trying to avoid any conflicts with the incoming White House. To many, this came as a surprise. Personally speaking, I believe all this is in the DNA of these businesses. These decisions are also probably directly connected to incoming policy decisions around Section 230 and antitrust, as Will Oremus on the Washington Post noted.
What are the events saying about the future of Big Tech?
I think a few masks are falling in California. After years and years of pro-journalism and pro-information stances, Meta is now sending clearly opposite signals. Let’s also not forget that the fact-checking program was also directly funding news organizations that were providing a public service, and they will now suffer from the sudden change and consequent freezing of funding. The risk is some of them may simply disappear. And this is happening because Meta’s CEO decided to join the culture war that Trump and Musk believe is taking place in the US, joining the anti-media side. For how much this change in policy can surprise the media world, I also think this is the clearest demonstration of at least two things: social media platforms were never designed to serve the public interest in the first place, and that we should not give billionaires the power to own and manage our digital public sphere. I am no political scientist, but I believe it is safe to say that the power Musk has been able to amass in the past few months and the use he did of the platform he purchased is closer to oligarchy than democracy.
On one side some argue that fact checking makes information more reliable. Others argue that a move away from fact checking will reduce censorship, which can have positive effects. What are your thoughts?
It is true that evidence emerging from research about the effectiveness of fact-checking as been ambivalent, but there’s 100% conclusive evidence of what happens to quality of information on social media when some of these measures are eliminated and we know this from the experience with the Muskification of Twitter. We should not forget that most of content moderation on Meta platforms will still happen through opaque and non-transparent algorithmic systems which are responsible for most of what we can call real “censorship” on social media. Evidence shows that voices to be mostly affected in this sense are marginalized communities, such as the LGBTQ+ one and political dissidence, which is frequently shadowbanned on Meta’s platforms.
The content moderation machine so far has been working in unjust, not transparent and ineffective ways, as many international digital rights organizations have been saying for years. The new measures announced by Meta won’t bring to a better situation. Yesterday, University of Copenhagen’s Rasmus Kleis Nielsen noted something interesting on Bluesky. In their 2024 EU Digital Services Act Systemic Risk Assessment and Mitigation Report, Meta itself wrote how their fact-checking programs formed “the basis to prevent the spread of large scale misinformation and disinformation". The report was published last August. Interesting how they suddenly they changed their mind.”
Dr Philip Di Salvo is a researcher and lecturer at the University of St. Gallen (HSG). Philip’s main research interests are investigative journalism, Internet surveillance, the relationship between journalism and hacking, and black box technologies. Philip works with the Chair of Media and Culture at the Institute of Media and Communications on different projects about algorithmic injustice, AI and human profiling and technological abuse. He also works as a freelance journalist for different publications, covering technology and its politics.