(C) Alec Muffett's DropSafe blog.
Author Name: Alec Muffett
This story was originally published on allecmuffett.com. [1]
License: CC-BY-SA 3.0.[2]


Facebook Derangement Syndrome, Part 2: Trust, Safety, and Community Notes

2025-01-08 12:06:34+00:00

Mark Zuckerberg (MZ) is a lucky sumbitch, and if I were misfortunate enough to be in his position I would do precisely the same thing:

[this post is part 2; see part 1 for prior context]

Back in 2016 Facebook made an annoucement in response to (déjà vu) a Trump election victory that was widely regarded by the left as “stolen” via the machinations of foreign states or lost due to the amplification of electorate ignorance being enabled by social media.

The simpler excuse that “someone who sticks a finger up at the establishment is likely to be popular in spite of everything” – as now undeniably exemplified by the magnitude of Trump’s victory in the 2024 election – at that time seemed less palatable (“we can’t blame the victims…“) although over here in Britain we’d been given a foretaste via Brexit.

But back to 2016: Trump won, and (some) people wanted heads to roll, and the techlash mindset dictated that social networking heads should roll, so MZ announced a program to fight fake news:

2016/CNN: Mark Zuckerberg has outlined a series of measures that should help prevent fake news from being shared on Facebook. The planned controls, which were announced in a late night Facebook post, follow accusations that a flood of fake news stories influenced the U.S. presidential election. “The bottom line is: we take misinformation seriously,” wrote Zuckerberg. “We take this responsibility seriously. We’ve made significant progress, but there is more work to be done.” The CEO said that Facebook (FB, Tech30) is working to develop stronger fake news detection, a warning system, easier reporting and technical ways to classify misinformation. Facebook has also been in contact with fact checking organizations. https://web.archive.org/web/20161120010511/https://money.cnn.com/2016/11/19/technology/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-fake-news-election/

This was a reasonable idea at the time to reactively respond to government-grade criticism but overall it was a huge strategic mistake:

In short: like the world’s richest masochist, MZ had handed civil society yet another huge stick and invited the them to beat him up with it.

Community Notes

Then in December 2022 Twitter actualised the age-old free speech adage that “the proper response to bad speech is more [good] speech” and it launched Community Notes upon the world.

Community Notes (CN) — implemented neutrally and properly — is a brilliant concept, not only for issues of enabling and empowering people to address their own issues (“If you find something you dislike, you can do something about it, even if the author has ‘disabled comments’ or similar”) — but also because of the huge corporate strategic benefits: your users become the fact-checker organisation following the “many eyes” model of open-source; because of the vox populi, vox dei aspect of CN it is practically impossible to criticise CN from a civil society perspective, other than to note that “it doesn’t act fast enough” which is an addressable problem and in any case suggests that the content at hand is not popular enough to warrant much attention — not that critics care:

The program is severely hampered by the fact that for a [CN] to be public, it has to be generally accepted by a consensus of people from all across the political spectrum. “It has to have ideological consensus,” he said. “That means people on the left and people on the right have to agree that that note must be appended to that tweet.” … Essentially, it requires a “cross-ideological agreement on truth,” and in an increasingly partisan environment, achieving that consensus is almost impossible, he said. [link]

Yes, people are actually saying that it’s a bad thing for CNs to be politically unbiased, at much the same time that others are saying that it’s a bad thing for fact checkers to be biased.

But quite a lot of Civil Society within my earshot has been saying “Facebook really needs to implement CN” for quite a long time; and now they’ve got it, and because of FDS quite a lot of those pundits have done a reverse-ferret and are now saying that CN is somehow a terrible idea for Facebook to adopt CN.

The reason for their doing so is: it looks like pandering to Trump.

“Any way the wind blows…”

All corporations are massive opportunists, and the good ones are agile as well; if you look back at that 2016 announcement it was a matter of about 10 days from the election to the announcement of the fake-news/fact-checker program. That’s not a hallmark of a considered anti-misinformation strategy, that’s evidence of reactive thinking to address a concrete issue which has become a potentially regulatory matter, and (before we crow about how effective that sounds) we should consider that:

as a solution “fact checking” has manifestly failed in several dimensions, as explained in the list above the consequence has been several years of flailing and stagnation re: addressing the actual issues in the meantime Twitter, later X, has been trundling along and innovating and has launched something which — in association with extant content-reporting flows, if only they were properly staffed — is considerably better.

So: Trump gets elected and MZ sees a massive opportunity, and jumps on it: toss out all the fact-checkers who make [his] life miserable and who actually create both work and cost, and embrace a better technical solution which is politically unassailable (again: vox populi) and scalable and user-enabling (always a good story) and do it in such a way that the newly-elected right wing believe that they are being tossed a juicy bone by newly-compliant tech companies who will be their “friends”.

It’s a brilliant tactic, and brilliant timing. He’s completely lucked-out, and we will (hopefully) get something better than what we have got, as a consequence. As explained in Part 1 neither MZ or Meta will care about the haters… with the possible exception of the European Commission, who I suspect will almost immediately stick their oar in, being the greatest and best-funded exponents of FDS on the the planet; so we’ll likely see a press release out of Brussels being “deeply concerned” by the end of the week, probably citing the interests of European fact-checking organisations.

So: overall I feel that we should celebrate this.

But will we? Probably not.
[END]

[1] URL: https://alecmuffett.com/article/110835
[2] URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

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