'Meta' in a statement on Jan 7 announced that it will scrap its eight-year-old fact-checking programme, reduce censorship and boost political content on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads.
With Donald Trump set to be the next US president, everyone in Silicon Valley is using this moment to get in his good books.
But Mark Zuckerberg, by getting rid of fact-checking on Facebook, is doing something more:
He is trying to curry favours with Trump as well as getting rid of something that he always found irritating.
There have been repercussions/adverse reactions globally.
The Nobel peace prize winner Maria Ressa says decision to end factchecking in US means ‘dangerous times ahead’ for journalism and democracy.
Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook founder and CEO, moved to contain the damage around the same time Donald Trump entered the White House.
He declared that facts were important because lies, which spread through Facebook, might have helped some politicians.
This was the beginning of institutional "fact-checking" at Facebook.
On January 8, Facebook is now officially ending its "fact-checking."
Meta's move to remove independent fact-checking on its platforms will have repercussions, but it will "not be affecting Malaysia's social media community anytime soon", said Malaysian Communications Minister Fahmi Fadzil.
The American-Filipino journalist Ressa said Mark Zuckerberg’s move to relax content moderation on the Facebook and Instagram platforms would lead to a “world without facts” and that was “a world that’s right for a dictator”.
“Mark Zuckerberg says it’s a free speech issue – that’s completely wrong,” Ressa told the AFP news service.
“Only if you’re profit-driven can you claim that; only if you want power and money can you claim that. This is about safety.”
Ressa, a co-founder of the Rappler news site, won the Nobel peace prize in 2021 in recognition of her “courageous fight for freedom of expression”.
The times are changing, said Zuckerberg for his part as he highlighted that facts are no longer as important as speech.
Ressa rejected Zuckerberg’s claim that factcheckers had been “too politically biased” and had “destroyed more trust than they’ve created”.
“Journalists have a set of standards and ethics,” Ressa said. “What Facebook is going to do is get rid of that and then allow lies, anger, fear and hate to infect every single person on the platform.”
"The recent elections feel like a cultural tipping point towards, once again, prioritising speech," he said. "So, we're restoring free expression on our platforms (and) going to get rid of fact-checkers."
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