In the future, the boundary between truth and lies will be defined by the users of the services themselves. The reform will be implemented first in the United States.
In addition to Facebook and Instagram, Meta also owns Whatsapp and Messenger. Adobe Stock / AOP
Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, plans to give up its separate fact-checking team. In the future, it will be up to the users themselves to verify the veracity of the content.
The matter was announced on Meta’s website in the writing. Joel Kaplan, who is Meta’s director of global social relations, is listed as its author. In the past, he has also served as the Deputy Chief of Staff of the US President George W. Bush.
In his text, Kaplan writes that the fact-checking of Meta, or Facebook at the time, started in 2016 with good intentions and good intentions.
However, according to Kaplan, today there are too many errors in fact-checking, which frustrate users and instead of facilitating the discussion, they make it difficult. Users also get port bans or their updates are deleted for no reason.
Meta’s new community fact-checking model is quite clearly modeled after X, i.e. the former Twitter. Kaplan writes that in X the comments created by the community and added to the content have worked, according to him.
However, there have also been problems with the use of community notes in X. They have been used, for example, to spread false information that Elon Musk, who currently owns X, is planning to kill himself.
A couple of months after introducing X’s community comments Wired on the other hand, reports based on insider information that the comments actually increase the spread of misinformation in X.
Meta’s community comments will be rolling out first in the US within a few months. The concept is also intended to be developed during the current year.
Kaplan does not say in his text how soon community notes will be implemented in other countries.
Anyone can’t create community notes in X, they have to apply for the position separately. Based on Kaplan’s text, Meta’s notes apparently work on the same principle.
Despite the transition to community comments, part of Meta’s content control remains the responsibility of the company itself.
However, Automatic Content Monitoring only covers the most blatant illegalities, such as terrorism, drugs and child abuse. Everything else needs to be marked as harmful by the users themselves, so that Meta does something about it.