Elon Musk’s change of direction after buying Twitter has consequences. Now the measures against fake news, hate speech and hate will soon be scaled back on Facebook and Instagram.
Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg announced this in a company statement on Tuesday (January 7th). In a video message, the former founder of Facebook made it clear that he would soon forgo fact checks on his platforms. Instead of complicated controls, there will soon be fewer restrictions.
As if Zuckerberg had read through too many tweets from X boss Elon Musk, he talks about how governments and “legacy media” have supposedly been “censoring” other people for too long. Meta would have participated in this in the hope that it would benefit people. Now he wants to focus entirely on “freedom of expression,” the 40-year-old said in the video. He calls this a step back to the roots.
Zuckerberg claims that fact checkers who recently sorted out hate messages and alleged lies were not neutral. He specifically mentions the topics of migration and gender equality.
And who will decide in the future what is true or a lie? This is what the users should do! Information should be written under posts in so-called community notes. Facebook and Instagram would no longer rely on third-party control. The meta boss says that references to information about checked content will soon be less conspicuous. This probably means: no more warnings to click away.
Fear of Donald Trump?
Tesla boss Elon Musk took similar steps when he bought Twitter and renamed it X. The billionaire announced that the short message service wanted to focus more on free opinion and immediately unblocked several right-wing extremist accounts. The depiction of violence and sex is largely possible without restrictions.
To what extent the radical change at Meta has anything to do with Donald Trump’s re-election is initially unclear. But the fact is that the large Internet companies apparently fear that they could be subject to more intensive state control or even broken up in the future.
Trump has repeatedly criticized Facebook in recent years and has loudly raised suspicions that the Internet service filters out conservative opinions. After the storming of the Capitol in January 2021, Trump’s Facebook account was blocked for two years.