Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta, announced sweeping changes last week to the company’s approach to disinformation and hate speech. Its fact-checkers, Zuckerberg claimed, “have just been too politically biased, and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created.” Henceforth the company will be removing fewer posts; it will instead append “Community Notes.” Along the way, it will dramatically pare down its content restrictions on topics like immigration, potentially risking the same sorts of crises that have long eroded trust in the company.
What happens on Meta’s platforms is more than just a matter of company policy. The prevalence of false information on social media and the ease with which it can proliferate have helped fuel division and violence in the United States and abroad. The company’s addictive algorithms were so effective in supercharging posts encouraging ethnic cleansing in Myanmar that Amnesty International called upon Meta to pay reparations to the Rohingya people. (The company said “we have been too slow to prevent misinformation and hate on Facebook” in Myanmar, and eventually took steps to proactively identify and remove posts.)
I first learned the importance of fact-checking while working as a reporter in Sri Lanka in 2018, when an episode of violence tied to Meta’s platforms rocked the country.
By then, Facebook had already resisted complaints about user content targeting minority Hindu and Muslim communities. Then a wave of posts went viral on Facebook alleging that Muslims were trying to destroy the Buddhist majority, including one in which a Muslim man, confused by a stranger’s accusation, appeared to admit he was part of a nonexistent scheme to sterilize Buddhists. A mob beat the Muslim man, destroyed his restaurant and set fire to a local mosque. Similar scenes unfolded across the country: Dozens of Muslim homes and businesses burned down, and at least three people died and 20 more were injured.
When Facebook did not act, the government imposed a national emergency and blocked access to it, along with WhatsApp and Instagram. “This whole country could have been burning in hours,” Sri Lanka’s telecommunications minister said at the time.
Two years after the fact, Facebook apologized and announced a “companywide effort dedicated to systematically understanding the intersection of our products and offline conflict globally.” But Zuckerberg’s announcement last week indicated a shift in priorities. “It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression on Facebook and Instagram,” he said, acknowledging that this is a trade-off: “It means we’re gonna catch less bad stuff.” Meta’s changes will be implemented first in the United States, but it’s easy to imagine how devolving discourse here could shape that of other countries.
Say what you will about fact-checkers, but they aspire to do more than just occasionally catch “bad stuff.” I hope, for the sake of the roughly half of humanity that uses Meta’s platforms, that the company finds a better path.
