Facebook dumps fact checkers; the internet responds

So, as you are probably by now aware, Meta CEO and near-perfect human simulacrum Mark Zuckerberg has entered a whole new era. He wears a gold chain now, and he has a perm. It looks very nice.

Also, perhaps more significantly, he’s dumping Facebook’s fact-checkers in favour of a Twitter-style ‘Community Notes’ system, as part of an attempt to ‘get back to our roots’ on free speech on social media platforms. It’s an alarming move that reportedly even caught the fact-checking teams themselves by surprise, and as many people have pointed out, the idea that this is going to in any way mitigate Facebook’s infamous problem with rampant disinformation seems implausible to say the least (time to move to Cara?).

This has also led a lot of people to start gleefully roasting Zuckerberg by posting fake headlines about him – since who exactly is now going to stop them? This has been especially popular on the Meta-owned Threads:

Post by @trs122p

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Post by @mightydems

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Of course, Zuckerberg hasn’t stopped at sacking the fact-checkers. He’s also been on Joe Rogan’s podcast to explain that companies need more ‘masculine energy’ and less ‘feminine energy’. And if that wasn’t enough, his company, presumably with his approval, has revised its hate speech policy, in which it now determines that it is acceptable for users to call gay people mentally ill, to refer to women as property, and to refer to trans people as ‘it’. Top stuff across the board.

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As you can imagine, there’s been a huge online response to Zuck’s whole new-year, new-me reinvention. A lot of the discourse has swirled around the reasons behind the heel turn, with the most popular explanation being that Zuck is simply cosying up to the incoming Donald Trump / Elon Musk presidential administration, a theory lent credence by Meta’s announcement that it’ll be relocating its trust and safety teams from Democratic stronghold California to red-state Texas.

Of course, there are other schools of thought:

Elsewhere, a lot of people are preoccupied by simply trying to imagine what a ‘Community Notes’ system on Facebook could actually look like. Though it’s been heavily associated with Elon Musk, the Community Notes system actually predates his takeover of Twitter, having been first implemented in 2021. It allows users to independently add context or clarification to each other’s posts, which are then rated by the community as helpful or unhelpful. Twitter demonstrated that it can actually work quite well – or at least, it works when a right-wing CEO isn’t transparently putting his thumb on the scale.

But Facebook is not Twitter (nor is it X). It is many orders of magnitude larger, its userbase skews older, and – let’s not mince words – it is ruinously infested with spam, scams and incomprehensible AI slop. Will this situation be improved by letting your most racistly lead-poisoned uncles graft a note saying ‘GET OFF MY PAGE!!!’ onto a picture of Shrimp Jesus? Unclear, but you’d have to say, probably not.

Ultimately, this is all pretty depressing. It’s hard to think that Facebook’s descent into a slop-ridden radicalisation incubator is going to be anything other than accelerated by these changes, while Elon Musk continues to turn X into his personal fiefdom of crypto scammers and blackpilled TikTokers. So here, enjoy a few more of the funniest roasts and memes we’ve seen about Zuckerberg and his latest right-wing firmware update. You might as well.

Post by @iainpaisley

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