The X-ification of Meta | WIRED

“Meta has always been a home for Russian, Chinese and Iranian disinformation,” says Gordon Crovitz, co-CEO of NewsGuard, a company that provides a tool to assess the trustworthiness of online information. “Now, Meta has apparently decided to open the gates completely.”

Again, fact checking is not perfect; Croviz says NewsGuard has already tracked several “false narratives” on Meta’s platforms. And the community notes model with which Meta replaces its fact-checking battalions may still be somewhat effective. Ma research by Mahavedan and others has shown that crowdsourced solutions lack vast swaths of misinformation. And unless Meta commits to maximum transparency in how its version is implemented and used, it will be impossible to know if the systems work at all.

It’s also unlikely that the switch to community notes will solve the “bias” problem that Meta executives cite as being so outwardly concerned about, since it seems unlikely to exist in the first place.

“The driving force behind all of this change in Meta’s policies and Musk’s takeover of Twitter is this accusation of social media companies being biased against conservatives,” said David Rand, a behavioral scientist at MIT. . “There is no good evidence of that.”

In a little published paper in Nature, Rand and her co-authors found that while Twitter users who used a Trump-related hashtag in 2020 were more than four times more likely to be ultimately suspended than those who used pro-Biden hashtags, they were also much more likely to have shared.” low-quality or misleading news.

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

And while X is getting a lot of attention in part because of Musk, remember that it’s an order of magnitude smaller than Facebook’s 3 billion monthly active users, which presents its own challenges when Meta installs its own note system. the community. only one Wikipedia in the world,” says Matzarlis. “It’s very difficult to get something crowdsourced from the ground up to scale.”

As for loosening Meta’s Hateful Conduct policy, that in itself is an inherently political choice. It always allows some things and does not allow others; Moving those boundaries to accommodate fanaticism doesn’t mean they don’t exist. It just means that Meta is better with him than he was the day before.

So much depends on exactly how the Meta system will work in practice. But between moderation changes and revisions to community guidelines, Facebook, Instagram, and Threads are edging toward a world where anyone can say gay and trans people have a “mental illness,” where AI slop proliferates even more aggressively, where outrageous claims spread unchecked, where truth itself is malleable.

You know: like X.