Great news. It's further evidence that the zeitgeist has shifted against the idea that platforms have a "responsibility" to do "good" and make the world "better" through censorship. Tech companies like Meta have done incalculable damage to the public by arrogating the power to determine what's true, good, and beautiful.
Across the industry, tech companies are rejecting this framework. Only epistemic and moral humility can lead to good outcomes for society. It's going to take a long time to rebuild public trust.
I'm certain it will make parts of the user experience worse, but at least for the Threads app, this seems at least a little necessary - if you're aiming to be the "new" twitter or whatever social need twitter was fulfilling, you need to break free of the shackles of IG/Meta moderation, which is very unforgiving and brutal in very subtle ways that aren't always easy to figure out. But basically, I find a platform like…
For the record, Twitter currently punishes people who call VIP's mean names and seems to take action against all negativity pointed towards certain ideologies that fit with the owners preferences, and they're talking about some opaque "positivity" changes which actually sound like automating the current manual moderation behind their censorship of wrongthink.
We should stop pretending that that website resembles its preceding namesake, because it does not.
From bad to worse. Meta is probably one of the single largest funders of fact checking. Now that appears to be coming to an end. Third parties will no longer be able to flag misinfo on FB, Instagram or Threads in the US. This is not good imho.
I think internet discussion worked far better without fact checkers, where some of them cannot really be called accurate. The community notes are the better approach. They aren't always correct either, but it certainly is the better fit for freedom of expression and freedom of speech. Fact checkers are the authority approach that just does not fit.
The problem with "Fact-Checkers" was that since they're human they're going to impose their own biases, and their own sense of morality. For well over a decade the majority of them were also left-leaning (per Silicon Valley), and so even true things that conservatives were trying to say got "censored" because these left-leaning folks believed their own sense of truth and morality were superior.
Fact-checking and censorship are two very different things.
The problem with "fact-checking" is that if it's done by humans at all then it will be heavily biased. With Silicon-Valley people being in charge of "fact-checking" for the past decade there's been countless examples of them doing mass cancellations calling things lies that we all know ended up being true.
> countless examples of them doing mass cancellations calling things lies that we all know ended up being true
really? like what, exactly? please give concrete examples or this is just hot air
I once posted a picture of an email stating my train was delayed in French. So the word 'retard' appeared in it. Instagram banned me from monetization or partnerships or something on my account, because the word for delay in French is offensive in English.
In Chinese there's a common word that sounds like a particularly offensive racial slur to the untrained American ear. I've seen Chinese speakers called out for this in person, but everything got straightened out pretty quickly. This was pre-social media, but it's not hard to imagine a social media uproar over it these days.
Austin is much closer to the center of mainstream American sentiment than the SF Bay Area, but it’s still to the left of center.
And Redding, California is far to the right of it. It's just coded language for who they're going to favor, otherwise it makes no sense at all, as it's possible to find people of all political stripes in both states, as well as employees who would take their duty to stick to the facts very seriously.
From bad to worse. Meta is probably one of the single largest funders of fact checking. Now that appears to be coming to an end. Third parties will no longer be able to flag misinfo on FB, Instagram or Threads in the US. This is not good imho.
Who was checking the fact checkers, when they were wrong quite often?
What I think I just read is that content moderation is complicated, error-prone, and expensive. So Meta is going to do a lot less of it. They'll let you self-moderate via a new community notes system, similar to what X does. I think this is a big win for Meta, because it means people who care about the content being right will have to engage more with the Meta products to ensure their worldview is correctly represent…
Community Notes is the best thing about Musk's Dumpster fire. The problem with CN right now, though, is that Musk appears to block it on most of his posts, and/or right-wing moderators downvote the notes so they don't appear or disappear.
I am not so sure that Musk or right-wing moderators are directly to blame for the lack of published community notes.
My guess: in recent months, many people (e.g., me) who are motivated to counter fake news have left Twitter for other platforms. Thus, proposed CNs are seen and upvoted by fewer people, resulting in fewer of them being shown to the public.
Also, I ask myself: why should I spend time verifying or writing CNs when it does not matter - the emperor knows that he is not wearing any clothes, and he does not care.
My door to Meta is closed and will never reopen, no matter what.
Facebook has cost me all my friends.
WhatsApp sells my phone number.
Threads banned me for commenting too much without giving it my phone number.
Facebook keeps or kept censoring my posts.
Fuck Meta forever.