Meta leader Mark Zuckerberg‘s surprise announcement that his company’s platforms — Facebook, Instagram, Threads, etc. — would largely no longer fact-check most content drew both praise and derision online.
The CEO of X, Linda Yaccarino, said “Community Notes FTW!” as Meta essentially committed to adopt X’s MAGA-approved version of hindering misinformation with a “community notes” approach — a flawed solution like all the others, but one its advocates claim leans toward “free speech” and away from “censorship.”
COMMUNITY NOTES FTW!!! 🔥
Fact-checking and moderation doesn’t belong in the hands of a few select gatekeepers who can easily inject their bias into decisions. It’s a democratic process that belongs in the hands of many.
And as we’ve seen on X since @CommunityNotes debuted,… https://t.co/zg51yUTGG1
— Linda Yaccarino (@lindayaX) January 7, 2025
(Detractors say that it also leans away from expertise, which is essential in the dissemination of information concerning issues of public safety. If it’s true that fact-checkers and experts, as Yaccarino correctly asserts, exhibit bias, then turning over the content moderation job over to a public with its own myriad biases may only exacerbate the issues. )
Yet the practical results of leaving the public to “democratically” determine what’s true — while admirable in the abstract — can produce real world results that engender conspiracy theories (see vaccine misinformation) and even outright lies.
The internet is, predictably, having fun at Zuckerberg’s expense with its newly granted freedom to commit some potentially libelous taradiddle, as seen below in a mock article saying Zuckerberg died of syphilis, but not before he committed some heinous crimes.
The argument the mock article makes is that while “community notes” opines about the veracity of the story — even eventually invalidating it — as Mark Twain famously said: “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.”
