Member-only story
Zuckerberg has bent the knee to Trump: be afraid, be very afraid
Mark Zuckerberg’s recent decision at the behest of Brendan Carr, Donald Trump’s choice to lead the FCC, to replace fact-checking on his social networks with a Community Notes-type system like X’s is the latest in a series of moves following the replacement of Nick Clegg by Republican lobbyist Joel Kaplan as chief global affairs officer to curry favor with the incoming president.
Plus ça change: in a company as appallingly irresponsible as Meta, fact-checking was a joke anyway, relying as it did on poorly developed algorithms and barely observed procedures, and a system based on oversight by the user community will be equally ineffective, and will likely generate even more problems.
Solutions such as X’s Community Notes are not inherently bad, indeed it could be argued that moving from moderators to such a model could be a step in the right direction, because it’s not the job of social networks to check facts. Community participation systems tend to generate greater diversity of perspectives and fewer accusations of ideological or political bias: a…