Meta Drops Fact Checking
(NextDraft, Dave Pell) — America’s Meta-morphosis continues as Zuck and Co announces that fact checking on its platforms is a thing of the past. Maybe it’s enough to know that Joel Kaplan, Meta’s new chief global affairs officer, “credited Elon Musk’s influence during an interview this morning on Fox & Friends. The reversal of the years-old policy is a stark sign of how the company is repositioning itself for the Trump presidency in the weeks before it begins. Meta described the changes with the language of a mea culpa: Joel Kaplan, Meta’s newly installed global policy chief, said in a statement that the company wanted to ‘undo the mission creep that has made our rules too restrictive and too prone to over-enforcement.'” (I’m not sure content moderation at Facebook’s scale is even possible, but when someone tells you that the problem is that social media discourse has been overly restrictive, you know you’re being trolled.) Meta also announced that Trump ally and UFC CEO Dana White will join its board.
+ This move follows a trend of generally letting more bad stuff happen online. For example: “The FBI and Department of Homeland Security have scaled back efforts over the past two years to disrupt violent extremists’ online activities, according to current and former US officials and internet radicalization specialists who fear the trend will accelerate under the incoming Trump administration.” Violent Extremism Lingers Online With US Flagging Less Content. Lies, violence, extremism … social media has finally reached a singularity with real life.
+ This Bloomberg headline does a pretty decent job of defining an era. Zuckerberg Wears $900,000 Watch to Announce End of Meta Fact Checks.
