When Mark Zuckerberg looked intently into the camera and told the world (or the next Donald Trump) that he was shutting down all fact-checking on Facebook and Instagram, he left out some important context. His changes apply only to U.S. users of Instagram and Facebook, similar to the EU’s laws targeting disinformation.
There are several ways to find out. If you believe that Facebook’s content moderation efforts are a form of censorship, Americans will enjoy new freedoms in Zuckerberg’s vibrant public square. If you think that’s protecting people from toxicity, you’re going to pity Americans. Either way, your social media experience will be different depending on where you live.
Of course, there were problems with Meta’s fact-checking policy. However, the cause was not the “political bias” that Zuckerberg cited without evidence as the reason for suspending the operation. That was a poor decision. It would have been wiser for Mr. Zuckerberg to order an upgrade to the fact-checking system that takes more nuance into account and invests more money into the effort.
But Facebook’s founder seems to like to jump on new trends and imitate his rivals, and he was supposed to do whatever was most politically expedient after Trump’s election.
With the departure of fact-checkers and the occasional “false information” label slapped on posts, American users of Facebook and Instagram are joining a voluntary system similar to X’s Community Notes feature to instead fact-check each other. You will be able to do it. .
This isn’t a terrible idea, but will the system work? Depends on who you ask. Academic studies have shown that the memo can counter some vaccine misinformation and help users distinguish between misleading posts, but the memo itself could take time to implement. There is a possibility that half-truths will spread by the time they are discussed and posted.
Alan Rusbridger and Khaled Mansour, members of Meta’s oversight committee for content disputes, don’t believe in this model.
In their editorial they write: “If this community memo model had been applied in the UK during last year’s Southport riots, there would have been no one to arbitrate wild rumors about the identity or religion of the alleged perpetrators.” The truth will be secondary to the competing claims of those who wish to participate. ”
What’s more certain is that the Facebook and Instagram experience will become even more geographically fragmented, and not just because of fact checkers. The Meta AI assistant, which reached nearly 500 million monthly active users in September last year, has been shut down in the EU due to concerns from the region’s top privacy regulator about using people’s data to train AI models. Implementation is delayed.
Zuckerberg seems disappointed that Europeans missed out on the opportunity. “It’s fundamentally sad that we have to instruct our teams to start new AI advances anywhere but the EU at this point,” Mehta said in a Threads post in December. He said this represented a “setback for European innovation”.
Of course not. European innovation is not defined by big Silicon Valley companies offering widgets to consumers in exchange for their data. Chatbots collect far more personal information than traditional Google queries, and Meta collects prompts that people enter into the AI.
Perhaps missing out on another data mining operation until the details are set up to handle them properly wouldn’t be the worst outcome for the Europeans. What Zuckerberg identifies as a regulatory barrier is the foundation for building public trust in AI systems.
Legal experts told me that Meta is unlikely to apply the EU’s new rules on disinformation, known as the Digital Services Act, to Americans. Doing so would be a big deal for Zuckerberg, especially if President Trump lashes out at EU officials who have fined companies like Meta and Google for violating the new law (and we know he will). would be politically costly.
This could usher in a new era in how social media giants follow European rules. When the EU announced the General Data Protection Regulation in 2018 to protect online privacy, many companies made changes globally because running separate systems was too complex and expensive. .
But leaders like Zuckerberg believe it is more valuable to run their platforms in a more fragmented manner and appease government officials on the other side of the Atlantic, leading to the so-called “Brussels effect.” ” may be weakening now.
The meta change will not be as dramatic as during the Great Firewall, when China developed a completely siled internet culture. However, the relationship between US and European internet users could become fractured in the coming years.
That may not be the healthiest course at a time of heightened trade and territorial tensions. ©Bloomberg
