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posted by hubie on Thursday January 09, @06:42AM   Printer-friendly
from the fact-checking-the-fact-checkers dept.

Facebook, Instagram, and Threads are ditching third-party fact-checkers in favor of a Community Notes program inspired by X, according to an announcement penned by Meta's new Trump-friendly policy chief Joel Kaplan. Meta is also moving its trust and safety teams from California to Texas:

"We've seen this approach work on X – where they empower their community to decide when posts are potentially misleading and need more context, and people across a diverse range of perspectives decide what sort of context is helpful for other users to see." Meta said. "We think this could be a better way of achieving our original intention of providing people with information about what they're seeing – and one that's less prone to bias."

The Community Notes feature will first be rolled out in the US "over the next couple of months" according to Meta, and will display an unobtrusive label indicating that there is additional information available on a post in place of full-screen warnings that users have to click through. Like the X feature, Meta says its own Community Notes will "require agreement between people with a range of perspectives to help prevent biased ratings."

The moderation changes aim to address complaints that Meta censors "too much harmless content" on its platforms, and is slow to respond to users who have their accounts restricted. Meta is also moving its trust and safety teams responsible for its content policies and content reviews content out of California to Texas and other US locations, instead of wholesale moving its California headquarters like Elon Musk did with SpaceX and X.

Also at BBC, MSN and NYP.


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by drussell on Thursday January 09, @10:48AM (7 children)

    by drussell (2678) Subscriber Badge on Thursday January 09, @10:48AM (#1388033) Journal

    I think it is mostly the simplest explanation... Zuck was on the "wrong side of Trump" and his authoritarian playbook.

    Trump literally just publicly threatened a few days ago to throw Zuckerberg in jail if he didn't start amplifying his insane positions. Zuck flew to Mar-a-Lago to kiss Trump's ring, bow down to him, apologize and pledge loyalty to the incoming king. He then announced that META is changing its moderation, getting rid of fact checkers, etc... It all comes as no surprise.

    The scary problem with all of this nonsense is that it is facts and truth which are the casualties of these recent trends...

    The major problem with all this, and what the people complaining in recent years (especially the vocal right-wingers) don't seem to grasp is that it is NOT their political ideology which is being "censored" because "others" don't like their political views... It is the fact that those ideological differences have morphed into a place devoid of truth, facts and reality! Nobody has a problem with a proper, healthy debate about actual policy positions, but that is NOT what the public discourse has become!! 😧

    For example, Trump and his followers are still harping on about how the 2020 US election was rigged, rife with problems, it was stolen from him, etc. but without providing any actual facts to back up this position. YEARS later, and they STILL haven't presented any actual evidence to back up their claims!! Sure, some people now believe there were problems, because they keep going out there and saying it, but it is NOT TRUE! This is not a political stance on an issue, in the proper, historical sense. It is brainwashed bullshit propaganda, lies repeated over and over until people begin to just take it as normal and some internalize it as fact.

    This is a major, MAJOR problem and is actually quite scary that the Overton window has shifted so far, on what is considered normal, on demanding actual facts to find the actual truth, has fallen by the wayside! 🙄

    I'm a fiscal conservative, but I cannot get behind all the other nonsense that so called "conservative" governments and parties worldwide seem to be hell bent on pushing! It is utter insanity!!

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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by zocalo on Thursday January 09, @11:35AM

    by zocalo (302) on Thursday January 09, @11:35AM (#1388038)
    I think that nailed it, but community moderation is also wide open to abuse. Viz. "creative" use of sock puppets and moderation points here, on Slashdot, and countless other forums.

    Unlike those forums however, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, et al are demonstrably highly scriptable and rife with bots as a result - most probably down to scale and widespread use by kiddies that wouldn't have a clue how to write their own script, which isn't likely to be an issue on smaller sites like this one where the return wouldn't justify the effort, even though it could almost certainly be done. Expect to see rampant abuse of the moderation system once those Mod-Bots get to work, which basically means it'll boil down to which side has the better coders. Pretty much the same kind of whack-a-mole game played out by the ad providers and ad-blockers (amongst others), basically, so it'll be ugly, a huge waste of resources that could be better spent elsewhere and, as usual, it's the people looking to browse the site that'll suffer, regardless of their personal views or susceptibility to accept conspiracy theories and propaganda as fact.
    --
    UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by mcgrew on Thursday January 09, @08:43PM (2 children)

    by mcgrew (701) <publish@mcgrewbooks.com> on Thursday January 09, @08:43PM (#1388130) Homepage Journal

    Zuck flew to Mar-a-Lago to kiss Trump's ring

    Ring? Odd spelling of "ass" or "arse". And here I thought being a billionaire made one so he doesn't have to kiss anybody's ass!

    I'm a fiscal conservative

    The meaning of the word "conservative" has been greatly twisted to mean nothing but "greedy and selfish." It used to be about waste, now it's about keeping the minimum wage WAY below a living wage and encouraging inflation. Today, "conservative" means "heartless bastard." I used to think of myself as conservative, but I'm neither greedy nor stingy. Both are required of today's conservatives.

    Conservatives used to conserve the constitution and rule of law. Trumps hates both, calling them "the deep state".

    --
    A man legally forbidden from possessing a firearm is in charge of America's nuclear arsenal. Have a nice day.
    • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Nobuddy on Friday January 10, @01:16PM (1 child)

      by Nobuddy (1626) on Friday January 10, @01:16PM (#1388239)

      "Conservative" has always been about protecting power and resisting progress that might threaten it. Conservatives have been on the wrong side of history every time an evil is addressed. The only difference between then and now is they have dropped all pretenses.

      • (Score: 2) by mcgrew on Saturday January 11, @07:47PM

        by mcgrew (701) <publish@mcgrewbooks.com> on Saturday January 11, @07:47PM (#1388432) Homepage Journal

        There are two kinds of conservatives, the monetary conservatives who are the definition of "conservative" that is a synonym for "Greedy and stingy", and one that wants to conserve values, whether good or bad.

        Conservatives were in charge between the flu pandemic and the Great Depression. The Roaring Twenties started with high inflation after the pandemic, and crashed after a decade of Republican rule.

        My Grandma, who was twenty in 1923, said the Roaring Twenties (Only Yesterday, FL Allen) [mcgrewbooks.com] only roared for the rich, much like the twenty twenties. I foresee great trouble ahead.

        --
        A man legally forbidden from possessing a firearm is in charge of America's nuclear arsenal. Have a nice day.
  • (Score: 2) by corey on Thursday January 09, @09:34PM (2 children)

    by corey (2202) on Thursday January 09, @09:34PM (#1388140)

    Good points, I didn’t know that Trump threatened Zuck. Do you have any refs to read more into it? That makes it more clear cut then it’s political. I guess they see it as a win-win on the cost savings then too.

    Man, the world is going so 1984.

    • (Score: 3, Informative) by drussell on Thursday January 09, @11:13PM (1 child)

      by drussell (2678) Subscriber Badge on Thursday January 09, @11:13PM (#1388153) Journal

      There is no secret about the threats of jail. It is literally even in "Trump's" (who knows who ghostwrote it) most recent book called "Save America" that came out back in August.

      In the past few days, Trump has even publicly said the he believes that Zuckerberg changed the rules specifically because of his threats of life in prison!

      See it: Trump says Mark Zuckerberg surrendered to his jail threat (Melber breakdown) [youtube.com]

      • (Score: 2) by corey on Sunday January 12, @08:56PM

        by corey (2202) on Sunday January 12, @08:56PM (#1388598)

        Thanks. Yeah the fact that trump thinks that his threats worked will just embolden his fascism.