When Mark Zuckerberg announced dramatic changes to Meta’s social platforms last week – including Facebook, Instagram and Threads – he admitted: “We’re going to catch less bad stuff.”
Zuckerberg said Meta would get rid of factcheckers, overhaul its content moderation and boost political content in users’ feeds – all 3.3 billion of them. He argued the company was doing it because the political winds had changed: the public no longer viewed these safeguards as a way of preventing the spread of misinformation, hate speech, or even real-world violence, but as censorship by other means.
It was a move typical of Meta and Zuckerberg, argues the technology journalist Chris Stokel-Walker – the company was reluctant to introduce moderation in the first place, and has often changed its policies dependent on who is in power. “He’s nothing if not politically expedient,” Stokel-Walker says. In a world where the right wing has weaponised the issue of free speech online – it is no coincidence that Zuckerberg’s announcement came days before Donald Trump re-entered the White House.
But what will be the real-world consequences of these changes? Jesse Stiller, a factchecker, tells Michael Safi about the impact of his work with Facebook and what may happen to the platform now.
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