Meta Is Taking All the Wrong Lessons From X

“The meta has always been home to Russian, Chinese and Iranian disinformation,” says Gordon Crovitz, co-CEO of NewsGuard, a company that provides a tool for assessing the credibility of online information. “Now the Meta has apparently decided to open the floodgates completely.”

Again, fact checking is not perfect; Kroviz says NewsGuard has already tracked several “false narratives” on Meta platforms. And the community comment model with which Meta will replace its fact-checking battalions may still be somewhat effective. But research from Mahavedan and others, showed that crowdsourced solutions miss a huge amount of misinformation. And unless Meta provides maximum transparency in the implementation and use of its version, it will be impossible to know whether the systems work at all.

It’s also unlikely that moving to community notes will solve the problem of “bias” that Meta executives so openly worry about, given that it’s unlikely to exist in the first place.

“The motivator behind this whole Meta policy change and Musk’s takeover of Twitter is to accuse social media of being biased against conservatives,” said David Rand, a behavioral scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “There’s just no hard evidence for it.”

In a recently published paper in Nature, Rand and his co-authors found that while Twitter users who used a Trump-related hashtag in 2020 were more than four times more likely to be ultimately suspended than those who used pro-Biden hashtags, they “low quality news” or misleading news were also much more likely to be shared.

“Just because there is a difference in who is affected does not mean there is bias,” Rand says. “Crowd ratings can replicate fact-checking ratings quite well… You’ll continue to see more conservatives being sanctioned than liberals.”

And while X is getting a ton of attention in part because of Musk, remember that he is an order of magnitude smaller than Facebook’s 3 billion monthly active users, which will create its own problems when Meta installs its own community notes-style system. “There’s a reason there’s only one Wikipedia in the world,” Matzarlis says. “It’s very difficult to crowdsource anything on a large scale.”

As for relaxing the Meta’s policies on hateful behavior, that in itself is a political choice. He still allows one thing and does not allow another; shifting these boundaries to satisfy fanaticism does not mean that they do not exist. It just means the Meta is more okay than the day before.

A lot depends on how exactly the Meta system will work in practice. But between moderation changes and community rule overhauls, Facebook, Instagram and Threads are moving closer to a world where everyone can say that gay and transgender people have “mental illness“, where AI scum will spread even more aggressively, where outrageous claims will spread unchecked, where truth itself is malleable.

You know: just like X.