Meta's imperfact reality: will truth spring from the crowd?

Community Notes are a solution of sorts to an intractable issue, yet their flaw is also their strength

by Rob Corbidge

Published: 16:00, 09 January 2025

Last updated: 16:09, 09 January 2025

Facebook and Meta's moderation systems have always been pretty blunt tools. Posting a WW2-era cartoon once got me sent to the Facebook jail, even though the cartoon in question was a genuine US Government propaganda poster urging restraint on the use of then-precious gasoline, captioned "When you ride ALONE, you ride with Hitler!". 

I never received a formal reason why it was flagged, but I assume it was automated pickup of the mere mention of the name in the artwork, and that being official Government issue mattered nil. 

I mention this in consequence to the news that Meta is abandoning its previous fact-checking policies, in favour of a new system of Community Notes, a la X.

The supposition by many has been that the move is a sop to the incoming Trump administration and a personal belief by the new President that Facebook and Zuckerberg have been out to get him.

It is equally believed that the intention to move Meta's US moderation functions from liberal California to conservative Texas is a similarly political decision and it undoubtedly is. Yet we should recognise the reality that Zuckerberg is running a business, not an ideologically pure message board.

Another indication of business change to suit political winds came with news that Nick Clegg, an English ex-politician of little domestic favour, was being replaced in his role as Meta's president of Global Affairs by the much Trump-friendlier Joel Kaplan.

He, and UFC boss Dana White, another Trump adherent, are both joining the company's board, news which immediately tested Zuckerberg's renewed pledge to promote free speech as the inhouse moderators took to scrubbing the company's internal comms system of discord.

Out with the old, in with the new. That's how you survive a change in the political environment when you are playing in those waters. It also reveals the essential moral weakness at the heart of a business such as Meta: in wishing to be all things to all people, it risks being none.

Does it even matter?

Despite the above, it's also true that fact checking often doesn't really have the desired intention of bringing the last word to a debate, as the travails of the BBC's Verify Unit can show us. 

Set up to provide quick rebuttal of misinformation and add trust to news, it has inevitably become an occasional whipping post for BBC critics who are hawk-like in pointing out when the organisation itself has relied on disputable claims.

It begs the question, and one only a resource rich organisation such as the BBC can answer, what are your reporters for if it not reporting facts? Why an additional fact function? Even sites such as Snopes, once a gold standard for verification, have fallen from grace in our disputation age.

Meta's Community Notes plan is an imperfect solution to an intractable problem, but I'd argue that it is probably the only one that can really work. 

Self-policing is always better than policing, and automated policing is the worst of all.

At the heart of the issue is how much "people" should be trusted. Ordinary people, I mean, of which I count myself as one. For those who relentlessly favour third party moderation, it's the ordinary people such as I who have no resistance to lies and are all part of an apparently manipulable mass who must be protected from untruths. 

There's also an obsession with the power of platforms. Well, forgive me for pointing it out, but Meta - market cap $1.5 trillion - have just paid obeisance to the incoming US administration. It is not they who hold the whip hand, but the US administration.

There's also the small matter of an upcoming antitrust hearing, which could see the giant forced to relinquish control of Instagram and WhatsApp. Zuckerberg, in his latest moves, is clearly hedging against this.

Rather than platforms, the true revolution, it seems to me, is in the use of personal messaging apps, such as WhatsApp, Signal, Viber etc. It is in those small, closed groups that much of the detailed information and opinion transmission work of our age is being done, for better and worse. 

It is there that the meme economy thrives, the short form video, the shared links. Here is the most powerful demonstration of the internet in its rawest form: peer-to-peer. Should we police this?

Lastly, there's a strong element of generational change in our technology use. The opinions that prevail around content moderation are largely those of people within a certain age range, yet the generations who have only known the screen are now entering the public arena and their relationship with technology is very different. 

Rather than being suggestible morons, many have developed a healthy critical layer towards what they consume online. They are alert to the garbage and are happy to point it out when they see it.

There is no perfect system, but let's not throw the tech baby out with the fearful bath water.