The Guardian reports,
Meta to get rid of factcheckers and recommend more political content
Meta will get rid of factcheckers, “dramatically reduce the amount of censorship” and recommend more political content on its platforms, including Facebook, Instagram and Threads, founder Mark Zuckerberg has announced.
In a video message, Zuckerberg vowed to prioritise free speech after the return of Donald Trump to the White House and said that, starting in the US, he would “get rid of factcheckers and replace them with community notes similar to X”.
X, the social media platform owned by Elon Musk, relies on other users to add caveats and context to contentious posts.
Zuckerberg said Meta’s “factcheckers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created”. The tech firm’s content moderation teams will be moved from California to Texas “where there is less concern about the bias of our teams”, he said. He admitted that changes to the way Meta filters content would mean “we’re going to catch less bad stuff”.
A reminder that on February 8th 2021, Facebook’s own blog announced:
Today, we are expanding our efforts to remove false claims on Facebook and Instagram about COVID-19, COVID-19 vaccines and vaccines in general during the pandemic. Since December, we’ve removed false claims about COVID-19 vaccines that have been debunked by public health experts. Today, following consultations with leading health organizations, including the World Health Organization (WHO), we are expanding the list of false claims we will remove to include additional debunked claims about the coronavirus and vaccines. This includes claims such as:
– COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured
– Vaccines are not effective at preventing the disease they are meant to protect against
– It’s safer to get the disease than to get the vaccine
– Vaccines are toxic, dangerous or cause autism
Emphasis added.
On May 21st 2021, Guy Rosen, Facebook’s “VP Integrity” posted an update reversing the above:
Update on May 26, 2021 at 3:30PM PT:
In light of ongoing investigations into the origin of COVID-19 and in consultation with public health experts, we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured from our apps. We’re continuing to work with health experts to keep pace with the evolving nature of the pandemic and regularly update our policies as new facts and trends emerge.
The first of the claims that were described as “debunked” in the earlier post and banned from being made on Facebook, that “COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured”, is now the mainstream view. The next claim, about vaccines (vaccines in general, not just Covid-19 vaccines) not being “effective”, is a matter of degree. Some vaccines are more effective than others, which means that some vaccines are less effective than others. Turning to the third claim, for some categories of people, particularly children, it was indeed safer to get Covid-19 than the vaccine against it. The fourth claim is the only one that I would confidently say is simply false. Obviously, my confidence in its falsity, previously close to 100%, has been damaged by that claim being bracketed in with other claims that were described as obviously false and debunked by experts, but which have turned out to be probably true. When Zuckerberg said that the “fact-checkers” he hired “have destroyed more trust than they’ve created”, he was right. Censorship always destroys trust. Better late than never in admitting it.
It seems the irony of the change of statement is lost. Were everyone to take facebook’s approach of censoring viewpoints alternate to the mainstream then “ongoing investigations into the origin of COVID-19” would not have taken place. The fact they had to change just shows the utter illegitimacy of not only the original policy, but the process by which the policy was made — namely that they should censor unpopular views.
I’ve been around the internet for a very long time. I remember reading the original original documents describing the world wide web and saying “nah, that’ll never work…” However, back in the day the equivalent of these sorts of blogs came over a system called netnews, and it had the same sorts of problems of spam, trolling, and miscellaneous nastiness that we have today. This was back in the days that the denizens of the net actually cared a lot about free speech. It was in the days of “The internet detects censorship as damage and routes around it.” The solution was what was called a kill file. It was a file describing the sorts of things you didn’t want to read. Some guy constantly post spam? Put him in the kill file. Don’t want to hear about vaccines and autism? Put it in the kill file. It meant that you were your own censor. You decided what crap to filter out.
I’m often frustrated that such a feature is not available today. Heck you could even sell it as a service and let people choose it s a package. Unfortunately those who have you trapped in a walled garden do not want to let you out.
Some vaccines *are* toxic, that’s how they work.
I was a bit down on Meta in my earlier comment. Irrespective of the irony and history, surely we can all celebrate that a set of platforms that is so widely prevalent is backing off censorship. And why? Because the think it is the “right thing” to do? Hell no, they are doing it because it is a prudent financial decision.
How awesome is that that the free market is putting pressure on companies to ensure freedom of speech. What a surprising twist of fate. What a glorious thing to celebrate.
And I think it is down to Trump. What an enigma that man is. So productive of massively positive social changes, while he is bloviating over totally ridiculous things like buying Greenland or renaming the Gulf of Mexico.
(BTW, the Greenland thing reminds me of another enigmatic man, Thomas Jefferson. He was such a proponent of freedom, while he had hundreds of slaves on his farm. But why Trump/Greenland reminds me of him is the Louisiana purchase. There is nothing in the constitution to justify the Louisiana purchase, and yet Jefferson, one of the biggest proponents of strict constitutional limits on the federal government, still signed that huge check to the French. He is a very complex man just as Trump is a very complex man.)
As he’s clearly having such a great time trolling the entire world about his purported strategic expansionist policy President Trump should also make it known to the incoming UK ambassador that due to TTK’s lack of good faith and basic common sense in not safeguarding the future of such a key asset he intends to take immediate sovereignty over the Chagos Archipelago.
As a side note if Mauritius really thinks they’re entitled to it they’re welcome to come and give it a try.
I have already dealt with this on another thread.
Often, not always but often, what the Guardian and the “independent fact checkers” call “lies” is THE TRUTH.
And what the Guardian, and the New York Times and the rest of the “mainstream media” (and academia – the schools and universities, the education system) call “the truth” is LIES.
Nor honest intellectual mistakes, LIES.
The Guardian types know what they write and say often (not always – but often) is-not-true.
Can you elaborate how changes that seem obviously in response to a change in political leadership and probably the pending antitrust trial Meta are facing are due to the ‘free market’?
@Martin
Can you elaborate how changes that seem obviously in response to a change in political leadership and probably the pending antitrust trial Meta are facing are due to the ‘free market’?
You might be right. Nonetheless it is still a positive development, much as I loathe anti-trust actions.
For some reason, Natalie’s (rhetorical?) question reminded me that a couple of days ago Dana White joined Meta’s board of directors 🤷🏻♀️
For years, Facebook and YouTube erased all content with any mention of the name Eric Ciaramella. I am not aware if YouTube ever cited what rule(s) was allegedly violated by people like Rand Paul who had posted a video of EC’s name without mentioning his alleged status as a whistleblower. Facebook misrepresented its own rules as in my own case.
I go on to note with documentation that in January 2020 I recommended a pardon for EC without explanation. I decided to wait for reactions before posting my explanation, but Facebook erased the comment in moments.
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/71901.html
Alan K Henderson,
I was going to just briefly comment that your experience of discovering that any mention of the name “Eric Ciaramella” on Facebook and YouTube was instantly deleted almost certainly without human intervention was very similar to my experience of finding that any combination of the words “Hunter Biden” and “laptop” was auto-deleted from the Guardian.
But when I tried to follow your link to your post “He who must not be named”, https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/71901.html, mostly to remind myself who Eric Ciaramella was, I found, with a depressing sense of inevitability, that it was distinctly hard to find.
First Norton sent me a pop-up message saying, “Threat secured. We prevented your connection to chicagoboyz.net because it is a dangerous webpage. Threat category: Script:SNH-gen [Trj]” (I sent a “False Detection” report.)
This was on Microsoft Edge. Then I switched to Google Chrome and tried again. It sent me a message saying, “This site can’t be reached The connection was reset.” I could get to the Chicago Boyz site as a whole, and to other individual posts within it, but not to that one. Finally, since I could see the title of the post was “He who must not be named”, I searched for that phrase plus “chicagoboyz” on Google Chrome and eventually got there.
You can probably tell from my recounting of this story that I do not know much about what, if anything, these two browsers and Norton Antivirus could have actually been doing in technical terms to make it so difficult to read that particular Chicago Boyz post. But it does seem suspicious.
Just for control purposes – I clicked the link several hours ago and was taken directly to the article.
USA, Firefox.
And again now.
But I DID get a similar result yesterday several times aiming at Samizdata.net, which never happens.
On the subject of Hunter Biden’s laptop, I think I can guess why the Feds were so paranoid about laptop stories. From the 2016 election:
https://vault.fbi.gov/fbi-communication-on-discovery-of-hillary-clinton-e-mails-on-anthony-weiners-laptop-computer/fbi-communication-on-discovery-of-hillary-clinton-e-mails-on-anthony-weiners-laptop-computer-part-01-of-01/view
Inspiration for this meme I created.
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/d2ef5dc5356b606612eb018a29a1b9a897b8de7aa0d5563a057b8538b1db2f30.jpg