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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: 2, Insightful) by c0lo on Thursday January 09, @11:07AM (4 children)

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Thursday January 09, @11:07AM (#1388034) Journal

    The judgement will be made by the community - which is good.

    Why is it good?

    and Trump will be able to sit back and say that he is satisfied with the way things are being managed.

    Let's assume Trump is out of the picture. Would you have no other objections?

    I think that Europe in general will not be satisfied with this effort.

    On what grounds?

    Note: all the above a pure (ie not loaded) questions.

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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by janrinok on Thursday January 09, @11:30AM (2 children)

    by janrinok (52) Subscriber Badge on Thursday January 09, @11:30AM (#1388037) Journal

    In answer to your first question: in a balanced community where all types are represented then having the community decide how a site is run is usually beneficial. The problem in this instance is that in many peoples' eyes the the sites have become polarised and therefore do not represent a balanced real-world view.

    As for Trump's involvement, I was looking at the reasons for this sudden change in 2 different organisations that historically have been quite opposed to each other. One reason, but I am sure that there are others, is that I believe they are both looking for an easy (or easier) time under Trump. It would be the same whoever was going to be the next President if he held similar extreme views, but we needn't speculate because we know the name of the President Elect. And whoever is in the big seat will want to ensure that he/she benefits as much as possible. With Trump we already have experience of how he works to further his own aims (and wealth) rather than those of the country.

    Europe will be unhappy because, although we don't really give a damn about the 'intelligence' of the average American, the spread of misinformation and false news is a form of propaganda which is also affecting many people in Europe who believe such garbage. Honest statements that are true are perfectly acceptable even if they are not what someone wants to hear, but foreign influence via propaganda is unacceptable. To Europe, the USA is foreign.

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    • (Score: 2) by owl on Thursday January 09, @04:13PM

      by owl (15206) on Thursday January 09, @04:13PM (#1388061)

      I was looking at the reasons for this sudden change in 2 different organisations

      Do note that "Community Notes" on Twitter/X is not a "sudden change". From Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]:

      The program launched in 2021 and became widespread on X in 2023.

      So the concept, so far as Twitter/X is concerned, is up to four years old.

      The suddenness is all on Facebook making this change here mere weeks away from the next administration inauguration. That timing looks both sudden, and suspicious, to those who want to view it as such. I've seen other posts where people point out that zero orgs. the size of Facebook/Meta can make a decision and turn on a dime, and that this change would have been in the works for months (or more) internally before the announcement (which is where the suspicious public begins measuring "age of plan" from). So yes, the timing of the public reveal looks suspicious, but that very well may be because these types (the C suite) almost always seem to ignore the calendar and what else is going on on the calendar when picking "ok, lets have this done by here....".

      Case in point for the above: $job scheduling a week of mandatory training that is also the same week as (for US folks) Thanksgiving, Christmas, or New Years. Note, the training division literally did this, except it was the week containing the US 4th of July holiday (not as big a travel week as the others, but still a time-frame that a lot of folks decide to 'get away to the beach').

    • (Score: 2) by aafcac on Friday January 10, @06:42AM

      by aafcac (17646) on Friday January 10, @06:42AM (#1388201)

      Yes, and on larger sites, there's more of an incentive for bad actors to involve themselves in inserting misinformation to bury the good information. I haven't seen much of that here as it tends to get a lot of pushback.

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by quietus on Thursday January 09, @07:39PM

    by quietus (6328) on Thursday January 09, @07:39PM (#1388117) Journal

    I'm watching the news on France2, and there's an item where a journalist creates an account on X, than just waits. Within an hour, her account has received tweets of, first, Musk, second Trump (anybody remember @realdonaldtrump around here?) and third, a French politician. Apart from the moderation issues mentioned, this feels a bit like Microsoft pushing its browser upon users of its operating system.