It wasn't long ago that Meta announced Wanting to discontinue the platform's own fact-checking program. First in the USA, then globally. This at a time when false information is rampant anyway — whether on the web, in dubious telegram groups, produced by hallucinating AI's and on social media anyway. At a time when politicians are publicly announcing Immigrants in Springfield would eat dogs and cats and make it to the White House with it. In itself, such a decision is actually a scandal. After all, social media is often a driver of such disinformation and is therefore obligated to combat it. However, the trend is moving in a different direction and the boundaries between fact and opinion are becoming ever more vague. Perhaps it is high time to address the issue. A plea for fact-checking, the importance of accurate information, and the relationship between objectivity and reporting.
One thing must be determined in advance: The basis for terminating Meta's fact-checking program comprises exactly two dimensions, namely the official and unspoken unofficial, which nevertheless remains an open secret. Experts finally all agree on the latter: Zuckerberg clumsily tries to lend himself to the new old President Donald Trump — not only because it worked so wonderfully for the self-proclaimed meme lord and knight of democracy, Elon Musk, but also because Meta simply benefits from this as a platform. Fact checking is expensive and the current zeitgeist allows renunciation in the name of freedom... sort of.
The official statement, of course, looks a bit different and therefore offers different reasons, but this is based primarily on one thing: Free Speech. For Meta, this means putting fewer restrictions (or political censorship, as Zuckerberg calls it) on posts in particular, posts on immigration, gender and gender identity. Instead, they wanted to give users back their voice; the opportunity to express themselves freely with a less restricted pluralism of opinion. The good, the bad and the ugly, as Meta calls it in the statement. This is where the roots of their platforms lie.
“Some people believe giving more people a voice is driving division rather than bringing us together. More people across the spectrum believe that achieving the political outcomes they think matter is more important than every person having a voice. I think that's dangerous.”
-Mark Zuckerberg
Two measures are also being implemented for this purpose: More personalized political content and community notes instead of fact checking, based on the model of X. Users therefore have the option of annotating and thus correcting postings. It's already working really well there, by the way.
The reasons for this system change are twofold:
The second point in particular is extremely interesting as a justification. Let's dig a bit deeper.
It should be said that the fact checking was not carried out internally by Meta itself, but through outsourcing in cooperation with various companies. The fact that Meta is now responsible for excessive censorship on their social media is disgusting, because they have not done anything more than fact checking — What was done with the controlled content was always up to Meta itself. Making false allegations against fact checkers and not expecting them to correct this is... well, questionable.
The companies, at least, would simply have submitted the corrections in accordance with Meta's established standards (including the caveat that politicians should not be factched) and that was when their own area of responsibility ended. Of course, this statement is not completely substantiated anyway, Meta finally assumes in subtext a one-sided political bias (liberal to left-wing, as the frequent narrative goes) and, assuming that this is the case, responsibility must continue at the Giga-Tech Group with 74,000 employees There are ways to correct them instead of delegating the mistake to the companies involved. Well, now the responsibility lies with the users anyway — and that poses major problems. Above all, of course, one thing: Users are universally none Fact checkers, particularly unregulated — they generally lack the necessary training. That's why there are experts on this. It is of course not the case that such a model cannot work (see Wikipedia, for example, more on that later), but there are requirements that Meta does not seem to set.
It just doesn't matter to the company, to put it bluntly. The great danger that this ultimately results from is the rampant spread of false information. This is not conjecture or doom: studies have already shown that fake social media posts spread up to 20 times faster. Fact checking prevents just that and the absence of it thus cultivates a wasteland of falsehood; the foundation of web demagogy, As can already be seen with X. But that is the example Zuckerberg wants to follow.
Users are the first to be affected by this decision As Angie Drobnic Holan, Director of the Internation Fact-Checking Network, notes:
“A lot of people think community notes-style moderation doesn't work at all and it's merely window dressing so that platforms can say they're doing something... most people do not want to have to wade through a bunch of misinformation on social media, fact checking everything for themselves. The losers here are people who want to be able to go on social media and not be overwhelmed with false information.”
Furthermore, the introduction of politically personalized content in this regard would be of little help. According to Dr. Cody Buntain, University of Maryland, another omen of radicalization: People who are already on extreme spectrums will invest even more time on the platforms, as there is more content that verifies their own worldview and, with increased consumption, reinforces, engages, knows how to flow into reality. Ergo: Political content can take shape in everyday behavior. A Pyrrhic victory that Meta is ready to accept, provided that the interaction rate increases. After all, you have to differentiate between the platforms here: Zuckerberg is taking this step not so much out of radical political conviction, but because of profitability and tenacity — in this sense, he is only prepared to lay the pit, which will be filled with liquid manure in the future. Musk, on the other hand — because X was, with the best will, never, in any scenario or parallel universe, profitable in any way — decided to buy his favorite platform (unfortunately the most prominent of its kind) to squeeze them into their own political hollow and stick the obligatory free speech sticker on it. Musk initiated it, but it must be generally acknowledged: We are entering an era of cyber anti-intellectualism, where scientific and journalistic expertise can be rejected out of pure gut feeling, where the lines between fact and fiction are blurred and opinion and empiricism can be given the same status.
While actors such as Musk and Trump or far-right parties from various nations are certainly playing their remarkable part in this public-intellectual turnaround, one thing must also be attested: a general distrust of science, the media, journalism. Proclaimed on the conservative spectrum in particular, but it would be wrong to say that it was only there. You feel called upon to provide some general journalistic education.
Imagine the well-known scenario: Morning comes, you wake up and first you swing on your cell phone to Instagram (which you shouldn't do, but you do it anyway) to take the obligatory look at Tagesschau in the morning and see what happened in the world today (which you certainly shouldn't do, but let's be honest). Scrolling into damnation is not very inspiring for the coming day, so the desperate attempt to restore faith in humanity follows by opening the comment section, where you encounter the following allegations: The Tagesschau is plagued by Wokeness, left-wing propaganda is that, it has nothing to do with objectivity, a narrative is being promoted here.
The same can be found in virtually every reputable source on world events. This opens up two things: that many people find it difficult when their own opinions are challenged by leading media with a commitment to faithfulness to the facts and that general media education is apparently not at its best. Quite provocatively asked: Does the Tagesschau have a political bias? Definitely. Just like ZEIT, Süddeutsche, FAZ and TAZ, New York Times and Washington Post. In extreme cases, BILD too, But the picture doesn't count, because BILD does not meet journalistic standards and is therefore not considered a reputable source for forming opinions. The other magazines did.
You can of course understand that this causes confusion for many people. On the one hand, mainstream media are committed to objectivity, to hard facts — and what are facts if not irrefutable? —, on the other hand, they have a vague political connection.
This seems contradictory, but it is the nature of facts themselves. Although these are irrefutable, they are also interpretable depending on the embedded environment — and this opens up a narrower and further definition of objectivity, as journalism professor Klaus Meier explainsWhat is the basic requirement of journalism. In the narrower sense, objectivity is fundamental adherence to facts and here all leading media should have the same basis and agree on the facts. However, the further definition is aimed at the question of importance, a selection of topics and actors in which the facts are embedded — and there is not always a consensus here. Let's take a hypothetical study on current climate findings as an example — one medium may ask how we can prevent this, and the other may ask how to finance it. The same factual basis, and yet completely different articles — and that's a good thing. Democratic pluralism, increased opinion formation. Diversity in journalism is a privilege, not political infiltration. Supraregional, singular newspapers, which all write the same thing, would be hallmarks of authoritarian to totalitarian states, as Meier notes.
In conclusion, you have to speculate, conversely, if it bothers you so much what the leading medium of the election writes, why you don't simply dedicate yourself to someone else. Someone that lives up to your own worldview — we have enough choices. If you do not want to challenge your own opinion, to look at another perspective with integrity, to reflect on your own views critically of the media and to maintain honest, intellectual discourse, it is advisable to simply throw the magazine aside instead of letting your fingers slide through the comment section. And why do we have such a selection in the first place, this journalistic diversity?
That's right.
Fact-based free speech. Talking about censorship here is more than just disagreement.
Musk recently made headlinesby accusing Wikipedia of left-wing political propaganda. Statements based on gut feeling, regardless of the fact that Wikipedia is decentralized and designed without a corporate agenda with the help of tens of thousands of volunteer editors who are meticulously fact-checked (especially for large articles with a lot of traffic). The New Yorker notes that Wikipedia is doing surprisingly well overall in maintaining its own standard of a neutral standpoint and states in its principles the almost exact opposite of Trumpism. Not least because Wikipedia is transparent with its own mistakes and tendencies — in return, you have a worded, separate entry created. That is the integrity that we need: the admission of our own false statements and the right of experts to correct them before major damage is caused. Fact checking is therefore not a luxury item that can be banished into the box of optional expenses as a cost-saving measure, but a democratic cornerstone, particularly in our digital age, where so much information is purchased online. Perhaps Musk, Zuckerberg, Trump and Co. are too trapped in their own bubble of subjective factuality of opinion to understand that. Much scarier, however, would be the idea — and unfortunately this is a realistic one — that the self-proclaimed advocates of freedom of speech actually understand perfectly what this entails — and what consequences follow. You really don't want to imagine the implications of this. Until then, it is recommended that you always remain critical. Also welcome with our contributions. 😉
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