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dead Bad news week It continued with its supervisory board Issue a review One of the company’s plans to continue Avoid third party validation on its platforms, which include Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, and replacing it with community feedback in countries outside the United States. The evaluation was not positive.
Community Feedback will launch in early 2025 To replace custom fact-checkers with a user-generated system. According to the report, Meta’s plans to expand its pilot program will have negative impacts on affected countries, including volatile misinformation that could influence elections, exacerbate global conflicts, and contribute to human rights violations.
The company asked the Oversight Board to review its plans to expand Community Feedback outside the United States and determine whether certain countries should be excluded. The Board’s assessment is that Community Notes is unable to help remove misinformation from Meta platforms.
“The delay in publishing feedback, the limited number of published feedback and its reliance on the reliability of the broader information environment raise serious doubts about the extent to which community feedback can meaningfully address harm-related misinformation,” the report says.
The assessment says problems with community feedback may be particularly serious in countries with repressive regimes, where elections can be influenced by misinformation, where coordinated disinformation networks exist, where linguistic complexities cannot be addressed by meta-technology, where there are barriers to internet access, and where major conflicts occur or there is a risk of political violence. These are places where the board recommends Meta be removed or reconsider its plans to use community feedback instead of third-party fact checking.
A representative for Meta pointed out to CNET Online response from the company It says it will respond publicly to the board’s recommendations within 60 days with an update to its post.
Big moderation change in meta
Meta relied on third-party fact-checkers for more than a decade before deciding to switch to Community Notes on platforms like Facebook. The move was widely seen as political. To gain the approval of the Trump administration.
like Nieman Labs Reports As noted in the Oversight Board report, community feedback has inherent problems: there is little incentive for community members to publish it, its publication is often delayed and it has not been comprehensively tested, with the program still in beta.
The number of Community Feedbacks published is also much lower than the actions taken from fact-checking programs. About 900 notes have been posted in the US compared to 35 million labels applied to Facebook posts across the EU since Community Notes was introduced.
In addition to the damning report from the Oversight Board, Meta this week also lost two lawsuits, One in New Mexico and One in Californiadue to allegations that its platforms are addictive by design and cause harm to children.
In a Latest reportThe European Fact-Checking Standards Network described Meta’s move away from fact-checking as part of a “major decline,” which it described as “a trend in which the world’s most powerful technology companies have backed away from their previous commitments to combat disinformation.”