What Zuckerberg Risks by Following Musk’s Lead

ONOn Tuesday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the social media behemoth would end its third-party fact-checking program in the US and instead adopt a crowd-sourced “community note” program. The inspiration for such a decision? X by Elon Musk.

“We’ve seen this approach work on the X,” said Joel Kaplan, Meta’s chief global affairs officer at statement.

Thanks to Musk and Zuckerberg, social media just keeps getting worse. Much, much worse. While that reality once sounded funny, it’s an unfortunate consequence of tech tycoons flooding their products with useless, and sometimes hateful, content.

Erosion of content moderation

After more than two years of Musk’s tenure at the helm of Twitter, which he renamed X, the world’s richest person has remade the platform in his own image: implacably unfiltered at best and likely bigoted at worst. Musk overturned many of the user-generated content rules that had long ruled the platform. For example, he went back to work Donald Trumpaccount after being banned for inciting violence on January 6, 2021; lifted the ban on expansion COVID-19 misinformation; and allowed users to once again harass transgender people giving birth to them wrongly.

He also granted additional reach to paying users (including many of his sycophants), dismantled important security tools such as blocking (people can still see your tweets even if you block them) and tasked its users with separating fact from fiction on the platform.

Now, X’s community notes, a system run under previous management under the name “Birdwatch,” have been posted with users offering correct diagnoses for the often dubious claims. Community notes sometimes work, but they’re no substitute for a site that actually enforces the rules on the intentional spreading of misinformation, propaganda, and dangerous conspiracy theories. As a result, many longtime users have fled the platform for alternatives such as Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads, a clone made by Meta’s parent company for Facebook and Instagram. (Analytical company Similarweb reported that 115,000 people deactivated their X accounts on election day alone; meanwhile, it’s Bluesky grew up from 9 million to 26 million users between September and January.)

A target is a company with a history of mirroring or perhaps copying other companies. When Zuckerberg couldn’t buy Snapchat in 2013Instagram has launched its own version of the application “Stories” feature. to great success. When TikTok threatened Meta’s social media dominance, the company added Reels to Instagram in 2021. And while X was mostly a distraction, not ad money, from Meta, it debuted Threads in 2023, pitching itself as a place to post short form thoughts away from the sleazy view of Musk and his fellow edgelords.

But on Jan. 7, Meta took another page from its rival’s playbook, this time announcing it was scrapping its third-party fact-checking program in place of an X-style community notes feature. In announcing the change, Zuckerberg said he wanted to rededicate himself to “freedom of expression.”

Political pressures at play

“Instead of going to some so-called expert, it’s instead relying on the community and people on the platform to give their own commentary on something they’ve read,” Kaplan said Jan. 2 in an exclusive interview with Fox. News.

In response to the policy change, President-elect Donald Trump said Meta had “come a long way,” signaling his satisfaction. This comes just months after Trump wrote that Zuckerberg should be confronted life in prison due to interference in the US elections.

Now, with Trump set to re-assume the presidency, it’s perhaps not surprising that Meta wants to pander to the Trump administration and kiss the ring. This is politically advantageous, especially given that Meta has to face the US Department of Justice in antitrust case in April that could lead to a forced sale of Instagram.

But the end result of the death of user content moderation is that Meta’s ecosystems are following X’s lead into a state of utter disrepair.

The current state of Facebook is dismal: Scroll through and you’ll find engagement announcements and new babies, but you’ll also find increasingly irrelevant product ads, a litany of Reels repurposed from TikTok, low-key sports meme pages, and group posts that couldn’t be further from your interests. Today I saw a post on “Downtown Moms – New York City” offering nanny services, despite living in Virginia and having no children.

Then there’s the whole AI thing. The decision to remove social media’s guardrails comes at a time when AI-generated content is flooding the internet. Scrolling through Facebook, I see a beautiful winter scene from the window of a coffee shop—or should I say “COFE” shop because writing board in the image, like most AI-generated media, it struggles to spell the words. Oh, and there it is a giant horse made of bread. Researchers at Stanford and Georgetown universities recently found that “spammers and scammers” driven by “profit or influence, not ideology” used AI-generated images to gain hundreds of millions of views and interactions on Facebook.

Instagram is so much better right now: I see a friend’s travel account, an ad for shirt with a mountain cow on it (I might buy that), University of Michigan football news (my wife went there), and tons of dog-related content (I might actually book that sitter for my dog). Instagram is far from perfect, far from the simple photo-sharing app it once was, but it offers a glimpse of what Facebook could be if its owners hadn’t given up and force-fed users garbage.

Facebook has been devastated in large part because the platform stopped showing users a lot of news and politics years ago. Meta has begun limiting the amount of “civic content” users see starting from 2021but now it was decided that something should be added back.

“We want to reverse the mission reversal that made our rules too restrictive and too prone to over-enforcement,” Kaplan writes in the aforementioned statement. “We are getting rid of a number of restrictions on topics such as immigration, gender identity and gender that are the subject of frequent political discourses and debates. It is not right that things can be said on TV or in Congress, but not on our platforms.”

When Musk took over the X, hate speech has increased on the platform, including increased usage N word, LGBT slurs and anti-Semitic vitriol, according to nonprofit watchdogs like the Center to Suppress Digital Hate and the Anti-Defamation League. In this way, X is not only rendered useless, but very useful to those trying to make the world a worse place for minority groups. Could Facebook and Instagram suffer the same fate?

The end of Facebook’s third-party fact-checking system is unfortunate, but the system didn’t matter all that much to the health and well-being of the platform for a simple reason: Most of the content on the site was apolitical. Now that Facebook is bringing politics back, there can be real-world harm without welcoming that discourse back into the arena. Pew Research Center 2020 poll found that 41% of American adults and approximately 70% of LGBTQ Americans have personally experienced online harassment. And according to Stanford Universityonline harassment can lead to serious emotional, physical and/or financial consequences in the real world.

Meta’s CEO follows Musk’s lead in both management and lobbying: he knows we live in a world where conspiracies and nonsense are more important than the pursuit of truth. Trump, who has repeatedly denied the results of the 2020 election, returns to the White House with a lead anti-vaccine advocate in Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. as his Secretary of Health and Human Services.

Zuckerberg doesn’t want to be left behind. And it won’t. Its users are the ones who will suffer the most when the platform gets uglier.