Meta Is Right To Consign Third-Party "Fact-Checkers" To Dustbin Of History

Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to do away with third-party fact-checking on his three social media platforms and opt instead for community notes (as done by Elon Musk’s X platform) is a sensible one.

Not because it will suddenly expand the universe for free speech, but because employing armies of fact-checkers is not the answer to platforms that host diverse forms of content from myriad sources.

The democratisation of content that these platforms enable cannot endure if humans are too involved in deciding what gets published and what doesn’t. That kind of editorial judgement is best left to publications and individuals, not platforms.

Not all the fact-checking in the world can really undo the lies, half-truths, misrepresentations, and fake news that technology has enabled over the last decade.

In fact, it is the wisdom and knowledge of the multitudes that can ultimately make such news relatively redundant. The pandemic of fake news can only be neutered by developing mass herd immunity to it.

Fact-checkers, even if they are honest and unbiased, cannot filter out more than a tiny fraction of the muck generated on mass platforms.

While Zuckerberg admits that eliminating fact-checkers may mean that more “bad stuff” may get published on his platforms — Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp — it would still be better than human censorship, where a lot of innocent stuff gets erased out of political correctness and fact-checking biases.

Critics will say that the Meta chief is kowtowing to Donald Trump after his election to the presidency, but it would be equally true to say that the same was happening during 2020-24, when news was censored if it went against the policies of the Joe Biden administration.

Didn’t Meta, Google, Twitter, Apple, and other platforms cancel Trump in January 2021 just after Biden won the White House?

What the Meta decision actually underlines are the following realities:

Once you know that your audience is of a particular kind, content producers will tilt their offerings to suit that audience, and platforms will direct traffic in that direction since it will give them advertising revenues.

Two, while it would still make sense to moderate violent or inexcusable content (like terrorism or child pornography), this job is best done through artificial-intelligence-led technology rather than human fact-checkers. After all, isn’t one person’s terrorist another person’s freedom fighter?

While technology cannot filter out all the bad stuff all the time, the assumption that human fact-checkers can do much better is questionable, for humans come with their own biases.

Right-wing and conservative content creators have long believed that the “liberal” platforms deny them an equal opportunity to be seen and heard. They believe that content moderation is no different from censorship.

Three, fact-checking is primarily the job of content creators, and what the rise of platform technologies has done is enable millions of content creators to participate in the conversation.

That some of them may misuse this democratisation of news and opinion spaces is no reason why platforms should adopt sweeping content moderation rules that may often be tantamount to censorship.

Four, the biggest opposition to Meta’s moves comes from fact-checkers themselves, who claim that they don’t censor any material, only point out false news from genuine ones. The actual decision to remove a piece of content is made by Meta itself. 

While that may be true, the “fact-checkers” should be seen as interested parties, for any broad-based moves to do away with fact-checking will reduce their own employment opportunities and power within the democratic system. 

The only long-term antidote against fake and other dangerous content is for users to develop a sixth sense about when they may be taken for a ride. They can also be given simple AI tools to inspect news sources and their origins themselves — just in case they actually want the whole truth.

Third-party fact-checking is scheduled for the dustbin of history. It is good that Meta has discarded these shackles.