Meta scrapped factcheckers because systems were 'too complex' | Hacker News Reader

Meta scrapped factcheckers because systems were 'too complex'

theguardian.com

36 pointsvinni285 comments

Marc Zuckerberg: "I notice Elon has become much more popular than I am. Elon also owns an internet social platform. Elon has removed most of the censorship from his platform. Maybe if I do the same I will be popular again too?"

There was a time when Zucerkberg was popular? His platform once was, but not its founder. There even was a movie on how he cheated others.

His platform which has over 3 billion monthly active users "once was" popular?

Facebook is for the let's just say older folks but Instagram and Whatsapp are wildly popular. Threads is meh. Began promising but has become a place for bots. Only account I check in once in a while is James gunn who seems devoted to that platform.

Ok? So his platform, which encompasses all of the things you mentioned and more, is still popular across a wide variety of audiences. Got it.

Yeah I wasn't trying to contradict what you were saying.

Marc Zuckerberg being popular is not the same as his platform being popular.

If anything, Elon has largely increased the amount of censorship on his platform[1][2]. The only demographic whose voice got louder is the far right[3], in order to please the new presidency. Zuckerberg is going for the same strategy, facts and democracy be damned.

[1] https://english.elpais.com/international/2023-05-24/under-el...

[2] https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2024/8/13/the-right-wing-l...

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/04/elon-musk...

> if anything

How on earth can you say that if you were alive during the pandemic?

Do you really believe it's better now? Have you opened any of the links in my previous comment?

I get the point with the government stuff but:

> remove censorship

> Left suddenly don't have a stranglehold on culture.

Hmmm

If by "remove censorship" you mean systematically promote right-wing content and downrank left-leaning content, unban neonazis, russian bots and other fascistic influences, then yeah, that's what Elon did.

Also what "Left stranglehold on culture" are you speaking of?? Workers have been losing rights in this country for decades. You clearly bought into the lies.

Here it is in the same format you did:

> Removes facts

> The right suddenly gets a stranglehold on culture

Hmmm

Wokeness is mostly random bits of academic communism renamed.

Ah yes, the famous woke USSR, in which you could be sent to the gulag for being gay.

Do you believe in your own ahistorical view of the world?

Ignoring that the USSR tried all this stuff in the 20s until Stalin got rid of it, you know full well that there's a difference between some communist academic working in an office in Berlin or whatever and the Soviet union

Who exactly are you taking about? Marx and Engels seldom spoke of sexuality. What does an economic theory has to do with LGBT rights? And no the USSR was never "woke"[1], not even in the 20s, you can't just claim stuff like that. Bring sources next time.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBTQ_history_in_the_Soviet_Un...

According to this chart, X is the most politically balanced social media platform:

https://x.com/stat_sherpa/status/1867627066826400096

This chart shows users, not reach.

I have an X account that I only use to access tweets friends send me occasionally. Whenever I go there, my "for you" page is filled with Elon Musk, Alex Jones, libs of TikTok, etc. Not a single remotely left-leaning account in sight.

If you don't believe me, try it. Create a new account and see for yourself.

According to this chart on X, X is the fairest and most balanced platform ever created. Nice.

Try this experiment. Make two posts. One with the word “cisgender” and the other with the N-word and see how balanced the platform treats you.

The former will mute your post for using a slur (?) but somehow the latter is allowed without any moderation at all (!).

Such balance. Musk has made no attempt to hide his thumb on the scale in silencing things he disagrees with.

Well yeah. If it said anything else they wouldn't be allowed to post it on X. Did you see the recent news that Elon banned his former supporters en masse for disagreeing with his stance on H-1B visas?

Also Marc Zuckerberg: "I notice Elon and Trump are 2 weeks away from running the primary government to which I'm more or less answerable... better batten down the hatches"

Elon hasn't removed most of the censorship from his platform - in fact, he's increased censorship - and I doubt Zuck will either.

What he's done is loudly proclaim to be removing censorship, while also removing censorship from the group that most loudly complains about censorship (which he also belongs to), and increasing censorship on their enemies, who are not so loud.

I think this was more "I can cut operational costs and ride the populism wave at the same time. Twofer!"

I doubt he cares about popularity, but he very much cares about his stock price and the things it lets him do.

Meta and factchecking - everyone outside US would see this as an impossible combination.

Meta is a business, and only does what benefits the business. That is why no one should rely on fact-checking done by Meta.

Not that facts matter much anymore anyway...

Fact checking is totally thankless work, because you'll get comments like this pretending it doesn't happen, and comments from both sides of the political aisle accusing you of prioritizing the other side.

Doing fact checking in a way that satisfies everyone is an intractable problem. I'd abandon it too. As a shareholder, this is just good business sense and I'm glad they did this. If y'all care so much about the facts you can contribute to Community Notes yourself.

all people shuld factcheck themselves rather than having some third party do this shit for them :S wtf happened to dont beleive everything everyone tells u?

i wonder how such ppl go through their daily lives. do they need a fact checker when they are at the barber making conversation? or in the pub? or are factchecks only needed on the internet because it someone is some kind of source of ultimate truth for ppl? i find this shit confusing as hell.

A lot of facts you cannot check. I am going to fly to the westbank to see who is lying or not? How do I factcheck stuff like that?

It's impossible for anyone to verify every claim they come across, people just don't have the relevant domain knowledge, resources or time to do the work necessary to evaluate everything from first principles.

People who think they factcheck themselves more often than not just default to believing whatever confirms their biases. Which, nine times out of ten, just means blind cynicism towards whatever the mainstream or status quo says.

Clearly this doesn't work, seeing how America just elected a compulsive liar, with popular vote no less!

I mean, they didn't vote for him because they enjoy he lies. They voted for him because the truth is inconvenient to the political agenda they want to see enacted.

That's why pointing out the right's entire platform is made almost entirely of contradictions doesn't change anyone's mind. They don't believe what they believe because it's internally consistent or coherent; they believe what they believe in because if it's correct, it substantiates the other things they already believed in, and/or it reinforces their existing biases. Tons of folks I grew up with will support the Republican party till the day they die because they came from a Republican family that voted Republican because they ARE Republicans, in the literal, identity way. The fact that basically every Republican policy demonstrably makes their lives harder is irrelevant; voting Democrat would be a break from the identity they cohere with that goes back generations.

For as much as the right endlessly whines and moans about "identity politics" it's really the only thing still holding their voting bloc together at this point.

Okay, i understand rupublicans will be republicans, since otherwise they have a conflict in their own identity. But how to explain that the 'swing' people swung to the dark side? To me, this makes USA look like another planet with alien logic and ideas, impossible to understand.

The structure of your question implies that a ton of voters changed their minds between the Democrats and Republicans between the 2020 and 2024 election, and while it's probable that some did indeed do that, that didn't decide the election. In both of those elections the winner by a landslide was "I don't care." Trump received ballpark 3 million more votes in 2024 than he did in 2020, but that still only represents the will of about 23% of the country, and the Democrats 22% of the country. "I don't give a shit" wins in a landslide with 55%.

(Also that's strictly the popular vote numbers, and doesn't account for the electoral college wherein millions of votes in both directions meant nothing because either the population centers overruled the will of rural voters or failed to do so and was itself overruled by them but I digress)

The issue isn't people "changing to the dark side," the issue is how energized the voting bloc for each party is, and how important they feel voting for their candidate is. Trump, for reasons beyond my understanding, gets his voters fired up. I honestly can't fathom how anyone can listen to that man speak and think he should be in charge of a lemonade stand let alone a country, but they apparently do. Much ink has been spilled ruminating on why Harris couldn't get it done, and the top theories seem to boil down to a few things:

* The most obvious: she's a woman. We haven't yet had a female president, and I don't think it's possible to ignore the role sexism has played in getting Trump in power when both the elections he's won thus far were against women, separated by one he lost against Biden, who besides being a man, had little really to get people excited, apart from not being Trump. Though after 4 years of Trump, not being Trump was probably more attractive too.

* The second most obvious: inflation is fucking obliterating America right now, and regardless of why you think that might be, or how stupid you think the following logic is, it holds historically true that people hold the White House and the party that occupies it responsible for things like that. The fact that Trump's few declared policy ideas are virtually guaranteed to make the economy worse in numerous ways wasn't enough to sway people from that either, or they simply didn't think about it that far (see the google trends for a massive surge in searches about "what are tariffs" after election day)

* The third most obvious: Harris' campaign was pretty middling. She didn't win a proper primary to secure the nomination; it was basically announced in the 11th hour that Biden wasn't going to run for re-election and instead of the standard process to select a nominee, it was basically a hand-wave and suddenly Harris was the candidate. And like, I didn't hate her (and did vote for her) but I'll be the first to tell you her campaign was... aggressively mid. There was a huge swell of support when she was announced to be replacing Biden but that seemed to be less a "pro Harris" support as much as a "thank goodness it isn't Biden" support, and the latter just didn't have the staying power to sway people long term, or keep the base energized.

> Meta is a business, and only does what benefits the business. That is why no one should rely on fact-checking done by Meta.

Correct, and in any kind of healthy society, we’d tell them to get off their dead corporate asses and stop enabling the boiling of people’s brains in a vat of political nonsense language for profit for the same reason we outlawed leaded gas and asbestos: because there are things about products that are more important than their profitability, and sometimes (at least in theory and at a time long past) we were willing to tell businesses “yes we know this makes you money but it’s also corrosive to our society and/or the people in it, so kindly knock it the fuck off.”

Nowadays we’re seemingly much more prepared to just feed everyone’s sanity to the industrial shredder that is the attention economy.

Factchecking is often very difficult without hard and often very dangerous journalism on the ground. And now that large swaths of the population don't believe the journalists on the ground anymore (saw some post of some journalist standing somewhere in isreal and the commenters said it was AI generated; it wasn't as you can still see that, but INDEED in the future that will be impossible to know) or any proof that goes against their belief system.

I find myself more and more disappearing in software & math; at least these things I can factcheck and I happen to like them more than anything else anyway. Build stuff; test andor prove things. Discuss with others without the vitriol of politics.

I imagine they'll be shutting down their advertising systems too, since those are so complex as well.

Ads actually provide value to hundreds of thousands of small businesses. I personally know multiple business owners that almost exclusively rely on Meta ads to survive.

Fact checkers provide no value over Community Notes and often just misinterpret things through their own politicized lens

Edit: Convinced that HN is mad about this change because it means that the common political leaning of HN will no longer be amplified. Community Notes is objectively the more democratic and fair solution here, and a technically sound one as well.

And community notes won't?

If they'll both misinterpret things, might as well go with the free, decentralized, and democratic option.

Facts are now whatever most people think is true.

For the kind of statements typically getting fact checked, unironically yes.

Facts aren't democratic.

One scientist can't possibly democratically verify facts if there are a hundred crazy family uncles and aunts not liking/denying their facts or simply feeling different.

Facts are a lot more nuanced than you seem to think they are, especially for the political statements typically being fact checked

It's absolutely trivial to creatively interpret statistics in a way that pushes your agenda and say "hey look the FACTS agree with me!"

I’m not mad about the change because of whose politics it amplifies. Mark Zuckerberg will do absolutely whatever it takes to line his pockets. He doesn’t a moral bone in his body. I just find it funny that he’s even attempting to pretend this is anything other than choosing the most politically expedient option.

IMHO the problem is these platforms playacting as governments, pretending like they have some impartial process-driven content moderation system.

The terms of service should just say, "This is our sandbox, you're welcome to play in it but we will remove whatever we feel like removing if and when we feel like removing it. Don't like it? Go someplace else."

This is actually the truth of the matter already, and all the dancing around third-party fact checkers and Acceptable Use Policies has always been a farce.

> Nick Clegg, had agreed “Meta systems have been too complex”, adding that there had been “over-enforcement”.

And on the other hand: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...

Do they think nobody would believe them if they said they ended the program because of the changing political environment they operate in?

They think it would cast a bad impression if they said that out loud.

Invading Greenland just seems a silly distraction.

But if you are Meta, which picked the non-Trump stance at the end of his prior termp, and are also a direct competitor to the Musk-owned Twitter, you really have to fall in line and get rid of any semblance of being anti-Trump and hire key Trump supporters to very senior well paid positions etc.

Else you will be the big bad enemy the new administration can focus all popular anger at.

As someone noted in the thread on OpenAI restructuring: Maybe these messages are not meant to convince outsiders but to reassure insiders/true believers. It provides them with a ready made narrative to counter the cognitive dissonance.

In four years, they’ll revisit the complexity. Facts may become simpler then.

Things aren't going back normal after four years. There won't be normal elections in four years. I hope I'm wrong.

Facebook is a platform business connecting click-worthy content with advertisers thriving on engagement. The FSB is a content generator with decades experience in producing click-worthy persuasive content. Providing the latter with open access to the former is good business for both parties.

The no censorship idealists ignore that on these „open“ social platforms individual people ideas compete with highly leveraged players effectively being drowned out and being de-facto censored by a firehose of propaganda. Platforms have no business incentive to fix as true, balanced, long form and moderate content is simply less engaging.

The reality is what is good business for the propaganda generators and the amplifying platforms has real externalized costs. At the scale this impacts all of us we should seek regulation protecting the power of the voice of one.

I’m sure Meta now also starts permitting nipples on its platforms. No? Oh right, that’s totally different.

It seems inevitable the people attracted to 'fact checking' and content moderation roles (whether paid or free) are likely to be activists with agendas to push.

It's a position that gives them power over their political opponents. Without that, it's probably a pretty miserable job.

The difference between "activists with agendas to push" and "everyone else" is surely one of degree.

The difference is that if you check 'facts' about good things Trump or Musk did, you're an activist with an agenda to push, but if you check 'facts' about bad things Trump or Musk did, you're doing the lord's work.

And I would have guessed that its a low pay job with high stress and turnover that attracts the desperate-for-a-jobs, not the crusaders?

Add: there have been lots of whistleblowers about working conditions on Facebook moderation.

A couple of accounts are https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-57088382 and https://www.ft.com/content/afeb56f2-9ba5-4103-890d-91291aea4...

Some people will seemingly spend every waking hour moderating multiple large subreddits for free. They get something out of it, and it obviously isn't money.

That would imply moving to a volunteer, public system of moderation would be, if anything, more activist and biased in nature than less.

A lot of them are autistic and they enjoy applying their version of "order" to a chaotic system.

The overlap between subreddit moderators and Dungeons & Dragons moderators is probably quite high.

Unless the crusaders are also payed by someone to push their crusade.

The Babylon Bee, a satire site, was repeatedly flagged for false information until their reach was crushed. There’s no reason to repeatedly flag obvious satire unless it’s from activists.

What evidence is there for this claim?

I saw the content warnings on it myself, repeatedly and then saw it show up so infrequently that I had to go to their page directly.

There have also been some very public stories about it, which I believe included a NY Times article that cause the owner’s attorney to get involved.

Most famously, censorship of the BabylonBee was one of the driving forces behind Musk buying Twitter.

https://x.com/sethdillon/status/1404457263197310989?s=46

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/16/technology/babylon-bee.ht...

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/11/us/politics/babylon-bee-c...

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/19/technology/political-cart...

Fact checking is now activism with an agenda? What a hot take. From what I understand Meta used fact checkers certified by Poynter’s International Fact Checking Network [1]. Now with "community notes" you will most certainly get people with an axe to grind.

[1] https://www.poynter.org/ifcn/

Poynter operates PolitiFact, which is blatantly partisan:

They mark accurate statements as 'mostly false', when what they really mean is they lack a very specific context, in this case per-capita adjustment to make killings 'disproportionate', but NOT e.g. per-homicide-perpetrator adjustment. One could of course argue what is the correct normalization, but PolitiFact doesn't do that - they simply label the accurate statement as false: https://www.politifactbias.com/2020/06/politifact-mangles-fa...

They omit fact-checks if those fact checks would give credence to their opposition: https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/tim-graham/2021/04/21/p...

Another example of labeling data that they themselves admit is accurate, as false:

https://upward.news/p/we-fact-checked-politifact-they-failed

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/feb/26/instagram-...

They label a claim as outright false when it was outdated by mere months: https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2022/apr/08/michael-kn...

They manufacture and debunk a strawman, when the claim is unassailably solid and cites the NYTimes and government commissions:

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1761228755031237032.html

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2024/feb/23/sean-parne...

So the claim "German perverts open bestiality brothels" was true in January 2013? Where were these bestiality brothels located?

No specific locations are given. However: bestiality was legal in Germany up until February 2013 [0,1], and Germany still has its own zoophile advocacy organization [1,2]. The number of zoophiles in Germany is estimated at 100k by this interviewed zoophile [3]. Wikipedia estimates zoophilia has a 2% incidence [4], which would equate to 1.6 million zoophiles in Germany, making the 100k a conservative estimate.

“The issue has become so public and inhibitions fall,” Astrid Behr, head of the German Association of Veterinarians, told Metro, indicating the growth of popular websites and forums, although she could not confirm the existence of rumored ‘pet brothels’. [3]

The Berliner describes zoophile sex parties and a large internet forum where they are organized [5].

“There are even animal brothels in Germany,” [the animal protection official for Hessian state government] said [..] “The abuse seems to be increasingly rapidly, and the internet offers an additional distribution platform,” she said. [6].

So we have a mountain of circumstantial evidence, confessions, an expert statement, and a direct statement by a government official (both claiming the problem is growing) - the kind of statement PolitiFact treats as definitive evidence when convenient [7]. And of course, PolitiFact deftly implies that because something is illegal (or has extremely recently become illegal), that it therefore does not happen. I'm looking forward to their articles on the Aylesbury/Banbury/Bristol/Derby/Halifax/Huddersfield/Keighley/Newcastle/Oxford/Rochdale/Rotherham/Peterborough/Telford child sex abuse rings: "Actually, rape is illegal in the UK. We rate these claims false."

I say looking forward, because currently, they have articles on precisely ZERO of them, somehow, despite what a scandal it was and is. But they do have "There's no evidence that Muslim immigrants are responsible for most of London's knife attacks" [8], so it's not that they ignore the UK. They just pick their battles.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/02/world/europe/german-legis...

[1] https://www.metro.us/bestiality-banned-in-germany-zoophile-s...

[2] https://www.zeta-verein.de/en/zoophilia/zeta-principles/

[3] https://worldcrunch.com/culture-society/a-real-animal-lover-...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoophilia

[5] https://www.the-berliner.com/politics/zoophilia/

[6] https://web.archive.org/web/20120205002624/http://www.theloc...

[7] The secretary of state also said there is no evidence of widespread voter fraud in Nevada, now or ever. - https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2024/feb/23/sean-parne...

[8] https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2019/feb/08/viral-imag...

FWIW, Newsbusters is run by MRC which is not exactly an unbiased or high quality source of information to say the least.

Can you point to an assessment by a meta fact-checker that you disagree with?

Would you say the same thing about criminal court judges too?

they can say whatever they want, it doesn't mean they really believe in what they say

I see a lot of memes on Facebook that would have been a sure ban last year now being promoted by the fb algorithm.

Rulers are changing, companies will change. And maybe people like Zuckerberg are really changing their opinions too. Who knows

The more direct reason that Zuck gave previously was because they couldn't rely on the political neutrality of the fact checkers. There's a fine line between opinion and fact I guess.

And community note participation will be guaranteed to be politically neutral, right, Zuck?

And I want to re-iterate that not everything should be politically neutral:

Stance A: "A certain group of people should be gassed with Zyklon-B."

Stance B: "No group of people should ever be gassed, you not should be saying that!"

Political neutral stance: "Maybe we could agree that some subset of that group could be gassed? I can't take a firm stance on this sensitive political matter."

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42621627

this is good news: I've always been scared of the so called "sources of truth", which think people are idiots.

The system is complex, and better educate people to face it: at 360°

This is a BS piece of PR fluff.

They aren’t scrapping factchecking in Europe, where it is a legal requirement. It’s not like they are pulling out of Europe.

^^^ These are the kind of Community Notes we need.

From the article linked: "The 40-year-old billionaire said that, starting in the US, Meta would “get rid of factcheckers and replace them with community notes similar to X” "

You are right this does not apply to Europe where you guys have strict laws that you actually enforce. But here in the US heaven forbid that the "Free" market has any sort of regulation that might make multi billion/trillion dollar companies have to work a little harder to not destroy the lives, health, or environment of our countrymen.

This is just the beginning and i sadly dont see it getting any better for several years. Large companies will have more free reign to do what they please in the US even more so than the current status quo

Hopefully Trump strongarms Europe into getting rid of those laws and restoring free speech. IIUC Trump explicitly mentioned he'd do this as part of this work with Zuck.

There is a difference between free supporting free speech and being an amplifier for malicious propaganda and engineered falsehoods.

It seems to be a hard line to define, but that line exists.

How is any of this even up for discussion. With only days away from Trump's inauguration Zuck is clearly bending the knee.

More like bending over

> Her comments came as Linda Yaccarino, the head of X, welcomed Meta’s decision, saying: “welcome to the party” during an appearance at the CES technology show in Las Vegas, hours after Zuckerberg announced the policy shift.

That's not ominous at all... Reducing moderation and prioritizing "free speech" have been a great success for X, right? Ok, in a sense it was a success, after all it helped get Trump back into the White House and Musk become one of his (currently) closest advisers, but for X as a company the prospects are not so rosy...

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