Zuck it
Mark Zuckerberg's decision to end fact-checking at Meta is clearly linked to US politics and the return of Donald Trump. But it will have ramifications globally, including in Australia.
Overnight, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg made a bombshell announcement: the company is abandoning fact-checking on its platforms and taking the foot off the pedal of content moderation generally. It represents the final dotpoint on an almost decade-long state of play that saw social media giants like Meta attempt some degree of self-regulation on content.
This will have significant implications for Australia — which has led a global crackdown on social media giants like Meta in various ways — although the situation locally is not clear cut. As John Buckley reported this morning, Meta has ongoing deals with fact-checking organisations like Australian Associated Press and RMIT FactCheck, which are set to run until at least the end of this year. (One can assume the chances of renewal are low.)
Prior to 2016, Facebook took a broadly laissez-faire approach to what its users posted on its platforms, reserving the strongest action only for explicitly illegal content. It was a libertarian approach also championed by companies like Twitter, which at one point described itself as "the free speech wing of the free speech party".
That began to change after the political paroxysms of that year — from the election of Donald Trump to Brexit — which saw Facebook saddled with the blame for everything from algorithmic filter bubbles to Russian disinformation operations.
