It's time to get back to our roots around free expression
136 comments
·January 7, 2025lapcat
The issue is not necessarily the policy changes by themselves but rather the context in which they are occuring, the very suspicious timing, which makes it look like Zuck is simply catering to the newly elected President. That's the opposite of "free speech" and eliminating bias.
And the notion suggested by Zuck that Texas is somehow less biased than California is ridiculous. Perhaps if he had suggested a swing state like Wisconsin, for example (which happens to have some empty space available where a Foxconn factory was never built).
gedpeck
Indeed. This is corporate America’s version of bending the knee.
Yoric
Yes, corporate America is bending the knee and paying for the coronation of Trump and/or Musk.
Another reminder that we may end up, occasionally, on the same side as corporate America, but that their reason to be is profit, not some moral cause, no matter how they're painting it.
That being said, if I were Zuck or Dorsey, I'd hate to have been involuntarily made arbiter of proper communication, and I'd jump on the first opportunity to pass the responsibility to whoever is willing to take it.
jjulius
Exactly, thank you. Between this "getting back to our roots thing" and this[0] development this week, it's obvious what this actually is.
[0] https://www.npr.org/2025/01/06/nx-s1-5250310/meta-dana-white...
maiple
A very smart business plan from a businessman
jacknews
Which reveals the lie that business serves people. Competition, free markets, best product wins, blah, blah, blah. It's all nonsense.
k2xl
He isnt saying texas is less bias, but from public perception perspective, california is biased.
lapcat
He is literally saying that Texas is less biased:
"Fifth, we're going to move out trust and safety and account moderation teams out of California, and our U.S.-based content review is going to be based in Texas. As we work to promote free expression, I think that will help us build trust to do this work in places where there's less concern about the bias of our teams. Finally, we're going to work with President Trump..."
fcsp
In your quote he says there's less concern about bias, not that there is less bias. That's an important distinction imho
locopati
every place is biased, everyone has biases... the question is whether the biases have anything to do with reality
mcphage
> but from public perception perspective, california is biased
The public perception pushed by whom, specifically?
mupuff1234
Dana White is joining Meta’s board of directors:
https://www.theverge.com/2025/1/6/24337670/meta-board-of-dir...
bjourne
Haven't they noticed what a complete cluster fuck "Community Notes" are on Twitter? Just way to easy to game and just way, waay to easy for hordes of trolls to "Community note" real accounts into oblivion. For example, a note on a story may read: "This image is likely AI-generated. Source: Some Random Post". Except Some Random Post is written by an idiot who is completely wrong. Doesn't matter one bit because the troll hordes can generate more clicks on the up button than the honest users can generate on the down button.
mike_hearn
Community Notes aren't simply voted on by counting clicks on an up button, it's more sophisticated than that. Go sign up and do some rating yourself to see how it works.
CNs are vastly superior to the NGO swamp Facebook have been funding for the past decade:
1. The CN community focus on the ordinary boring stuff that NGOs ignore. A huge number of community notes are highlighting financial scams, obfuscated adverts, stuff faked for viral engagement and so on. They aren't political but this is the bulk of what needs fact checking on social networks. Because they're crowd sourced, CN posters are incredibly good at this and easily identify obscure videos or pictures that have been taken out of context (or indeed AI generated). In contrast the ecosystem that FB funded seemed to focus primarily on contentious political claims.
2. To go live a CN needs agreement from people across the political spectrum. The algorithm behind this decision is quite smart. It's reminiscent of the old Slashdot meta-moderation system, for instance you are asked to rate notes across multiple different criteria that come with objective definitions. The result is that CNs are almost always written in a neutral style that just briefly presents facts with sources, and the extremely biased "fact checks" of the sort that have been embarrassing Facebook for years are basically absent. By the nature of the system sometimes bad CNs appear briefly, but they get fixed quickly.
3. Because it's algorithmic and anyone can write notes, it doesn't discriminate in favour of the rich and powerful. Elon Musk gets community noted, he even sometimes just posts stuff and then asks CN specifically to check it. Facebook's "fact checks" were written by the sort of people who simply assume academics, civil servants and activists are always right, with the result that they never fact checked such people even when they were saying things that were completely wrong.
4. They are much more concise.
5. Even the name is better. They don't claim to be final judgements of truth, just notes created and voted on by an amorphous community. This is a much more defensible claim: much of the scorn towards fact checkers acknowledged by Zuck is because they claim to be "checking facts" but often just pick fights or try to block true facts they don't like.
amyames
I’m agreeing with you.
Twitter used to have a problem with retaliation if you dared talk back or correct the “wrong person” (mass reporting, suspending, taking down anyone who bruises an influencers massive ego - which still works unfortunately and is still a problem under Musk. But CN made sure this wouldn’t happen to you for telling the truth.)
Or a minor nitpicking comment or correction becomes a flame war and now someone’s digging up your high school year book photo or your DUI mugshot from 20 years ago. (Root cause being, again, twitters retaliatory culture) CN just kinda stops people from shooting the messenger.
And sometimes the messenger sucks but still has a point.
CN is a twitter-specific solution to Twitter-specific problems.
It would have also been good if they’d stop suspending people with no human review just because an influencers army of flying monkeys reported them. It “only” takes about 50 and then you’re done forever and all appeals denied. This is one of several reasons I don’t use Twitter, none of which are political or about it’s supposed “owner.”
You can’t block these guys, god forbid you reply to one- no thanks
qingcharles
Agree with all that, but would counter for Musk's CN's specifically there is definitely monkey business going on. Most of the CNs never show up for his disinfo, so either he's manually removing them or they are getting brigaded to hell.
mike_hearn
Sometimes Musk does post a factual claim that's wrong in some way, specifically asks for a fact check, or posts something misleading, and then a CN does appear. Examples:
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1876435054622388257 (from yesterday)
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1876554867785007175
But why not sign up for a CN account like I did and go look. Last time I did this almost every tweet he posted had a gazillion proposed CNs but one of the rules that the community is good at enforcing is that a CN is not meant for just arguing with someone. Many of the proposed CNs on Musk's posts didn't meet the criteria to be a note and so they get meta-moderated out on the grounds of "no note needed" (NNN), which is the reason people pick when a tweet isn't making a factual claim to begin with.
Most of what Musk posts are either opinions or just retweets, and arguing with an opinion is always supposed to be marked as NNN. And CNs go on the original tweet not retweets.
bjourne
> Community Notes aren't simply voted on by counting clicks on an up button, it's more sophisticated than that. Go sign up and do some rating yourself to see how it works.
I did. I was almost immediately locked out since too many people disagreed with me. And no, it is not more sophisticated than that. Users have become very good at exploiting the system resulting in only clicks counting.
> To go live a CN needs agreement from people across the political spectrum.
This is false and is not the "security hatch" you think it is. Rather than arguing these points, just look at a few suggested CNs:
Tweet: "A white grooming gang caught abusing 30 girls. The youngest was 5. Why did this not receive as much attention?" CN: "It did get attention which is demonstrated from the screen grab attached to the post which is from the BBC website."
The CN is not correcting misinformation. It attempts to argue with the twitterer because, apparently, replying is not good enough. Another one:
Tweet: "Doctor admits Israeli pathologists harvested organs without consent" CN: "The full article says Israel admitted to harvesting organs from deceased IDF soldiers. Israel denies the claims of harvesting organs from Palestinians, which originated from a Swedish news outlet. No evidence exists that Israel harvested organs from Palestinians at this time."
Except the CN is wrong and Israel indeed harvested organs from slain Palestinians: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24590832 Another one:
Tweet: "Rennes are completing Brice Samba deal from RC Lennes as planned, it’s all set to be sealed." CN: "The team is called RC Lens, not Lennes."
The CN author is collecting points here. Correcting a misspelled name of a football team doesn't add much, but by doing so the author can farm karma for use on more impactful notes. Another:
Tweet: "Shut up, Elon Musk! We don‘t want your fascism in Europe!" CN: "Elons actions don‘t seem to support the claim of fascism according to the defining 14 Points of fascism of Umberto Eco:"
Again someone who prefers the CN feature over replying. Yet another, from the former president:
Tweet: "Four years ago, violent insurrectionists attacked the Capitol, threatened the lives of elected officials, and assaulted brave law enforcement officers." CN: "Neither Trump, or any of the January 6th defendants, were indicted, charged or convicted of "insurrection" as a result of the Jan. 6, 2021 riot. Calling the rioters "violent insurrectionists" does not accurately reflect any of the charges filed. "
Yeah, that just, uh, your opinion, man.
These examples are all from English Twitter, where the huge number of users balance the situation out somewhat. On Swedish Twitter, where a famous left-wing politician might collect 20 likes for a tweet if they are lucky (drawback of being only 10M people), the right-wing trolls utterly dominate. If one politicians complains about high electricity prices the trolls will be there with a CN about how "they destroyed nuclear power" (utterly false BS) or if it's about crime the CN will be about how "you let the immigrants in".
> Because it's algorithmic and anyone can write notes, it doesn't discriminate in favour of the rich and powerful.
Uhu. They said the same thing about Wikipedia, didn't they? In reality, fanatics with a lot of free time on their hand and those who can pay for meat puppets will decide what the truth is.
stvltvs
You're assuming Meta's goal is to prevent misinformation and disinformation.
TylerLives
I believe he is being honest. I remember him making similar remarks in the past, saying they don't want to be the arbiters of truth. Most tech companies were like this before, but they were pressured by some other force to censor. Glad to see that's changing.
conartist6
I have heard this argument directly from Zuck once on a Friday long ago, but a few things:
1. Since then the rise of LLMS has made it easy to accomplish censorship without preventing anyone from speaking. Just drown out voices of moderation with endless engagement bait, or create a network of bots to make it seem like tons of people are reporting a particular community note as inappropriate.
2. The second half of Zuck's thought at the time was that moderation should be more community-oriented -- that communities around the world should have more freedom to make their own decisions around what kind of content was appropriate speech. Unfortunately while I see a gesture in this direction with community notes, it doesn't appear that the community has been given any power to stop a hateful message from being amplified.
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gedpeck
It’s bad for society that peddlers of stupidity can do so at scale and for little cost. We now have millions of people doubting the benefits of the polio vaccine. This disinformation is spread primarily through a few websites. It seems to me that they ought to have some responsibility to restrict destructive disinformation.
TylerLives
When you suppress ideas in this way, they become more attractive to a large number of people. There is a problem with bad ideas spreading quickly on the internet, but censorship hasn't helped with this imo.
chimprich
> When you suppress ideas in this way, they become more attractive to a large number of people.
That sounds superficially reasonable, but I don't think that it's true.
Turn the sentence around: "when you spread ideas more widely, they become more attractive to a large number of people". Repetition works. It's why trillions gets spent on advertising each year.
gedpeck
Anti-vaccine sentiment didn’t arise due to suppression. It arose due to the ease of cheaply spreading a message on social media. We ran the experiment and see the results.
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drawkward
Free speech should not include disinformation, which is an attack on society.
Of course, the devil is in the details of enforcement: who watches the watchmen?
bluenomatterwho
Websites like this? https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1383764/
gedpeck
[flagged]
NickC25
and why shouldn't they be forced to censor?
they are regarded by society as the arbiters of truth, regardless if they wish to be or not.
not that i'm a fan of censorship, but if a foreign power's strategy is to sow mass disinformation, it's up to the corporation to stop it.
don't like it, Mark? you don't have to have $100 billion either, you could willingly give all of it up.
Gud
No they aren’t, most people know Facebook is mostly filled with bullshit.
philipwhiuk
Getting your community to fact-check is certainly cheaper.
phatfish
Or rather, the anonymous hive-mind is now deciding if something is factually correct. Completely unaccountable, perfect for social media.
mrcsd
So, just like normal then?
I don't disagree with being cynical about social media, but community belief is the overwhelming mechanism by which fact is decided throughout history, including now.
phatfish
A community can certainly have beliefs, doesn't make them true in a factual sense. Some things are "decided" by the majority opinion, like how we think of gender. Others have an objective truth, whether the majority likes it or not.
chimprich
"Community belief", or the appearance of it, can be engineered by a bad actor with sufficient resources: an authoritarian state, a think-tank with sufficiently rich sponsors, or the platform itself.
auadix
Back to our roots of free work, sorry, expression.
bitshiftfaced
The technology now exists that allows the company to offload the ugly business of "fact checking" onto users. It's a pretty clever algorithm, and if they implement it transparently like on X, then it means they can avoid a whole class of criticisms and accusations. This is a no brainer for Meta.
UncleMeat
This isn't about saving money on tooling or reviewers. This is about the incoming Trump administration and not wanting to have him decide to point his administration at Facebook because he is pissed at them.
DougN7
This is exactly right. All hail Trump. All bow and worship Trump. We’re watching in real time a phenomena that I think is not new to the world, but new to America.
selectodude
Once they go after somebody like Mark Cuban and Khodorkovsky him, it’ll all make sense.
freehorse
Also it opens a new field of commercialization in the social media space, in a time where troll farms seem like a legitimate business.
raverbashing
Honestly one thing that works well on Twitter is community notes (and better than "fact checking")
timmg
This is interesting. I welcome it.
The cynical side of me knows that the content review humans are expensive. “Community Notes” is (I assume) volunteer. So it may also be a bit of a cost-cutting measure.
HarHarVeryFunny
Maybe also a keeping Trump happy measure, given that he's been threatening Zuckerberg.
timmg
I mean, arguably, the installation of a lot of these processes were also driven by the government (and whoever was president at the time.)
HarHarVeryFunny
I think the pressure to keep it family friendly, and not be an anything-goes shitshow, is more from advertisers who don't want their ads to appear beside anything objectionable. I don't known how that works with FaceBook or Twitter (who are bleeding advertisers), but with print media advertisers apparently get to specify lists of words (pertaining to objectionable subject matter) that disqualify articles from appearing alongside their ad.
The majority of FaceBook's business is advertising, so that is presumably their primary concern (or at least was, until Trump's threats have become an issue).
NickC25
Which is sad.
All these centibillionaires kissing the ring is just sad.
They have the money, economic might, and social capital to not have to engage with Trump.
Instead, they kiss his ass. Why?
drawkward
Because they tacitly acknowledge that Trump is an authoritarian who will come after them, if they dont kiss the ring. They would rather keep their wealth and freedom than do battle with an authoritarian.
masfuerte
* hectobillionaire
A centibillionaire is worth ten million.
throw16180339
It's the same reason that companies within Nazi Germany had to make nice with Hitler.
There's an authoritarian in charge who will use all capabilities of the government to harass his opponents. The Supreme Court said that Trump can do whatever he wants, so you can kiss the ring or watch him seize or shut down your business.
mojo74
"Never let the truth get in the way of a good story."
So say X, FB and the company they keep.
pixelsort
Roots? FB's roots are frat boy pranks and backstabbing your actual friends. Better headline: Billionaire backtracks on freespeech after a private meeting with a much more powerful billionaire to discuss ways of making amends for his pesky commitment to a well-informed society.
amyames
> his pesky commitment to a well-informed society.
You shouldn’t get high this early.
aosaigh
I understand that fact checkers and moderators can have biases but surely this new direction needs to be coupled with some more robust bot detection and abuse systems to stop people gaming things like “community notes”
conartist6
Did they make any distinction between allowing hate and lies and giving them the full force of viral engagement-baiting?
paxys
"Our content moderation team in California was too liberal, so we are replacing all of them with Texans, who will have zero bias of their own of course."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42621627
https://about.fb.com/news/2025/01/meta-more-speech-fewer-mis...