Meta scrapped factcheckers because systems were 'too complex'

There was a time when Zucerkberg was popular? His platform once was, but not its founder. There even was a movie on how he cheated others.

I think this was more "I can cut operational costs and ride the populism wave at the same time. Twofer!"

I doubt he cares about popularity, but he very much cares about his stock price and the things it lets him do.

Elon hasn't removed most of the censorship from his platform - in fact, he's increased censorship - and I doubt Zuck will either.

What he's done is loudly proclaim to be removing censorship, while also removing censorship from the group that most loudly complains about censorship (which he also belongs to), and increasing censorship on their enemies, who are not so loud.

Also Marc Zuckerberg: "I notice Elon and Trump are 2 weeks away from running the primary government to which I'm more or less answerable... better batten down the hatches"

If anything, Elon has largely increased the amount of censorship on his platform[1][2]. The only demographic whose voice got louder is the far right[3], in order to please the new presidency. Zuckerberg is going for the same strategy, facts and democracy be damned.

[1] https://english.elpais.com/international/2023-05-24/under-el...

[2] https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2024/8/13/the-right-wing-l...

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/04/elon-musk...

Factchecking is often very difficult without hard and often very dangerous journalism on the ground. And now that large swaths of the population don't believe the journalists on the ground anymore (saw some post of some journalist standing somewhere in isreal and the commenters said it was AI generated; it wasn't as you can still see that, but INDEED in the future that will be impossible to know) or any proof that goes against their belief system.

I find myself more and more disappearing in software & math; at least these things I can factcheck and I happen to like them more than anything else anyway. Build stuff; test andor prove things. Discuss with others without the vitriol of politics.

> Meta is a business, and only does what benefits the business. That is why no one should rely on fact-checking done by Meta.

Correct, and in any kind of healthy society, we’d tell them to get off their dead corporate asses and stop enabling the boiling of people’s brains in a vat of political nonsense language for profit for the same reason we outlawed leaded gas and asbestos: because there are things about products that are more important than their profitability, and sometimes (at least in theory and at a time long past) we were willing to tell businesses “yes we know this makes you money but it’s also corrosive to our society and/or the people in it, so kindly knock it the fuck off.”

Nowadays we’re seemingly much more prepared to just feed everyone’s sanity to the industrial shredder that is the attention economy.

Fact checking is totally thankless work, because you'll get comments like this pretending it doesn't happen, and comments from both sides of the political aisle accusing you of prioritizing the other side.

Doing fact checking in a way that satisfies everyone is an intractable problem. I'd abandon it too. As a shareholder, this is just good business sense and I'm glad they did this. If y'all care so much about the facts you can contribute to Community Notes yourself.

all people shuld factcheck themselves rather than having some third party do this shit for them :S wtf happened to dont beleive everything everyone tells u?

i wonder how such ppl go through their daily lives. do they need a fact checker when they are at the barber making conversation? or in the pub? or are factchecks only needed on the internet because it someone is some kind of source of ultimate truth for ppl? i find this shit confusing as hell.

[dead]

Ads actually provide value to hundreds of thousands of small businesses. I personally know multiple business owners that almost exclusively rely on Meta ads to survive.

Fact checkers provide no value over Community Notes and often just misinterpret things through their own politicized lens

Edit: Convinced that HN is mad about this change because it means that the common political leaning of HN will no longer be amplified. Community Notes is objectively the more democratic and fair solution here, and a technically sound one as well.

As someone noted in the thread on OpenAI restructuring: Maybe these messages are not meant to convince outsiders but to reassure insiders/true believers. It provides them with a ready made narrative to counter the cognitive dissonance.

Invading Greenland just seems a silly distraction.

But if you are Meta, which picked the non-Trump stance at the end of his prior termp, and are also a direct competitor to the Musk-owned Twitter, you really have to fall in line and get rid of any semblance of being anti-Trump and hire key Trump supporters to very senior well paid positions etc.

Else you will be the big bad enemy the new administration can focus all popular anger at.

They think it would cast a bad impression if they said that out loud.

Things aren't going back normal after four years. There won't be normal elections in four years. I hope I'm wrong.

And I would have guessed that its a low pay job with high stress and turnover that attracts the desperate-for-a-jobs, not the crusaders?

Add: there have been lots of whistleblowers about working conditions on Facebook moderation.

A couple of accounts are https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-57088382 and https://www.ft.com/content/afeb56f2-9ba5-4103-890d-91291aea4...

Can you point to an assessment by a meta fact-checker that you disagree with?

The Babylon Bee, a satire site, was repeatedly flagged for false information until their reach was crushed. There’s no reason to repeatedly flag obvious satire unless it’s from activists.

The difference between "activists with agendas to push" and "everyone else" is surely one of degree.

Would you say the same thing about criminal court judges too?

Fact checking is now activism with an agenda? What a hot take. From what I understand Meta used fact checkers certified by Poynter’s International Fact Checking Network [1]. Now with "community notes" you will most certainly get people with an axe to grind.

[1] https://www.poynter.org/ifcn/

And community note participation will be guaranteed to be politically neutral, right, Zuck?

And I want to re-iterate that not everything should be politically neutral:

Stance A: "A certain group of people should be gassed with Zyklon-B."

Stance B: "No group of people should ever be gassed, you not should be saying that!"

Political neutral stance: "Maybe we could agree that some subset of that group could be gassed? I can't take a firm stance on this sensitive political matter."