Wanna say something absurd on Facebook without anyone to tell your audience it’s wrong? Make it a paid ad, I guess.
In early January, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that his platform would be getting rid of its fact-checkers in favor of Community Notes. It turns out, those Community Notes meant to keep posts factual and accurate won’t apply to paid ads, Reuters reports, citing an anonymous source. The only content that community notes will apply to is “organic content,” and fact-checking will still not apply to any content at all. As The Wall Street Journal first reported, aspects of the program might still change.
Meta’s decision to move towards Community Notes, a decision that copies Elon Musk’s move at X, was met with its fair share of criticism. Free Press Senior Counsel and Director of Digital Justice and Civil Rights Nora Benavidez said in a press release posted after Zuckerberg’s announcement that content moderation isn’t a “tool to repress free speech,” but is, rather, “a principle that the platforms themselves developed to promote dialogue and protect truth for users.”
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“While Zuckerberg characterized the platform giant’s new approach as a defence of free speech, its real intentions are twofold: Ditch the technology company’s responsibility to protect its many users and align the company more closely with an incoming president who’s a known enemy of accountability,” Benavidez said in the press release.
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Making paid ads exempt from the scrutiny of Community Notes nods towards something Zuckerberg has been pretty clear about since the beginning of Facebook: profit over people, every time.
When X decided to move towards community notes, it lost a significant amount of money in ad revenue, because community members could leave notes on paid ads that pointed issues such as dropshipping, mobile game ads that don’t match the game play, and AI-related copyright issues. Meta, it seems, is working to avoid that type of ad loss by not allowing Community Notes on paid ads at all. It’s not yet known if they’ll be allowed on paid endorsements from celebrities and influencers.
It seems these decisions — removing fact-checkers in favor of Community Notes, lifting prohibitions on certain forms of hate speech, scrapping DEI initiatives, removing trans-inclusive features, and more — were made in haste to appease President Trump’s administration. So it might take time to see how each of the changes roll out onto each platform.
