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 for assessing the trustworthiness of online information. “Now, it seems that Meta has decided to open the gates completely.”

Again, fact checking is not perfect; Croviz says NewsGuard has tracked several “false narratives” on Meta platforms already. The community notes that the model that Meta will replace its fact-checking brigades with is still fairly effective. but research Mahavidan and others have shown that collective solutions miss large swaths of misinformation. Unless Meta commits to the utmost transparency in how its version is implemented and used, it will be impossible to know if the systems work at all.

Turning to community feedback is also unlikely to solve the “bias” problem that Meta executives ostensibly worry about, since it’s unlikely to exist in the first place.

“The impetus behind all of this change in meta policies and Musk’s Twitter takeover is this accusation that social media companies are biased against conservatives,” said David Rand, a behavioral scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “There’s no good evidence for that.”

In a recent post paper In Nature, Rand and his colleagues found that while Twitter users who used a Trump-related hashtag in 2020 were four times more likely to eventually comment than those who used pro-Biden hashtags, they were also more likely to engage. Low quality or misleading news.

“Just because there is a difference in who is acted upon does not mean there is bias,” Rand says. “Crowd ratings can do a very good job of reproducing fact-checkers’ ratings… You will still see conservatives being penalized more than liberals.”

And while “There’s only one Wikipedia in the world,” Matzarlis says. “It’s very difficult to crowdsource anything at scale.”

As for relaxing Meta’s hateful conduct policy, that in itself is an inherently political choice. It still allows some things and does not allow other things; Moving these boundaries to accommodate intolerance does not mean that they do not exist. It just means that the Meta is more compatible with it than it was back in the day.

A lot depends on how exactly the Meta system works in practice. But between moderation changes and an overhaul of its community guidelines, Facebook, Instagram, and Threads are moving toward a world where anyone can say that LGBT people “have”Mental illness“, where artificial intelligence will spread more powerfully, where outrageous claims spread unchecked, and where truth itself is malleable.

You know: just like X.