Categories: Business

Facebook abandons fact checkers; Internet responds

So, as you probably already know, Meta CEO and near-perfect human simulacrum Mark Zuckerberg has entered a whole new era. He now wears a gold chain and a perm. It looks very pretty.

Additionally, and perhaps more importantly, it abandons Facebook’s fact-checkers in favor of a Twitter-style “community notes” system, as part of an attempt to “return to our roots” in of freedom of expression on social media platforms. This is an alarming move that would have surprised even the fact-checking teams themselves, and as many people have pointed out, the idea that this could somehow alleviate the Facebook’s infamous problem with widespread misinformation seems implausible to say the least (time to move to Cara?).

Of course, Zuckerberg didn’t just fire the fact-checkers. He also appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast to explain that businesses need more “masculine energy” and less “feminine energy.” And as if that weren’t enough, his company, presumably with his approval, revised its hate speech policy, in which it now determines that it is acceptable for users to call gay people mentally ill, to consider women as property and referring to trans people as “it”. The best stuff across the board.

As you can imagine, there was a huge response online to Zuck’s reinvention for the new year and the new me. Much of the discourse has revolved around the reasons behind this shift, with the most popular explanation being that Zuck is simply cozying up to the new Donald Trump/Elon Musk presidential administration, a theory that was reinforced by Meta’s announcement according to which this will be the case. relocating its trust and security teams from the Democratic stronghold of California to the red state of Texas.

Elsewhere, many people are simply preoccupied with trying to imagine what a “community rating” system on Facebook might actually look like. Although it has been strongly associated with Elon Musk, the Community Notes system actually predates his takeover from Twitter, having been first implemented in 2021. It allows users to add regardless of context or comments. clarifications to each person’s publications, which are then deemed useful by the community. or useless. Twitter has demonstrated that this can actually work very well – or at least it works when a right-wing CEO doesn’t transparently put his thumb on the scale.

In the end, this is all pretty depressing. It’s hard to think that Facebook’s descent into a rundown radicalization incubator will be anything other than accelerated by these changes, while Elon Musk continues to make X his personal fiefdom of crypto scammers and blacklooted TikTokers. So here, enjoy some more of the funniest roasts and memes we’ve seen about Zuckerberg and his latest right-wing firmware update. You might as well.