Multiple social media platforms such as Meta, Facebook, Instagram and X(Twitter) have removed third party fact checkers in hopes to eliminate unwanted biases and censorship.
A Fact Checkers job can consist of helping give context and/or additional information somehow related to a topic without the influence of political or unfactual opinions.
“Fact checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created, especially in the US,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said.
When asking students about any changes on their feeds, most agreed that they biased related changes. But other functions may have been changed or even removed.
“Not really[any changes on his feed], but I have noticed that like whenever I do see political posts or whatever, there’s no you know, fact check button anymore, which isn’t very helpful. So then I don’t really know what to believe or not,” senior Eli Knaebel said.
Regardless of any noticeable related updates, hopefully the changes help users instead of discourage them. But the possibility of biases wasn’t the only reasoning behind the change. Some hoped to be able to freely speak their mind again.
“We want to make it sothat, bottom line, if you can say it on TV, you say it on the floor of Congress, you certainly ought to be able to say it on Facebook and Instagram without fear of censorship,” Meta’s head of global policy Joel Kaplan said.
With the problem of potential falsehoods and censorship, changes are necessary to build trust again.Meta chose a very similar method to X – communal notes.
“Meta is abandoning the use of independent fact checkers on Facebook and Instagram, replacing them with X-style ‘community notes’ where commenting on the accuracy of posts is left to users,” BBC News said.
Community notes can consist of extra info, data and context from everyday users to get differing opinions on the same topic. Rather than having a few professionals work on it at a time, perhaps the saying, ‘Many hands make light work,’ is the right way to go. Having multiple users look for the facts at the same time.
“Alexios Mantzarlis, the director of the Security, Trust and Safety Initiative at Cornell Tech, – who himself once ran a ‘crowd-sourced’ fact checking project – argues this type of system potentially allows platforms to ‘get more fact checks, more contributions, faster,’” BBC News said.
That’s the plan and reasoning behind the new system. But not everyone considers the update as something necessary or helpful.
“I think that someone can see a whole bunch of people’s different opinions, that might help them more form their own research on whatever it is,” sophomore Ellie Bush said.
Having multiple people’s viewpoints can be useful when it comes to researching news. But always remember to double check where and who you get your information from.
“I think it could become something like Wikipedia that’s still made by the people, and it could be trustworthy with time. I think when it first happens, I don’t think it’s going to be good at all, but eventually I think it’s going to develop into something good,” sophomore Nolan Largent said.
Untrustworthy sources are the main counterargument for saying communal notes are a benefactor. But another problem would be society being biased in their own opinion.
“One of my concerns with communal notes is that we end up in a bit of an information bubble, or a filter bubble based on what we searched. I think we’re fed a lot of information that follows along with our viewpoints. And I think it happens for all of us, and I’m afraid it’s going to drive us more into those biased bubbles, instead of what the moderate middle kind of is,” Computer Science Academy Facilitator Kristin Higgins said.
But when there’s concerns and complaints, there’s room for improvement. In the future, changes could be made that a majority of society would agree is beneficial.
“I think a better way would be to somehow create an open source fact checker model that is based off of not a profit organization, but rather, just a volunteer organization of people interested in where technology is going to go. And if they regulated how those fact checkers work, and then we implemented them kind of uniformly across systems, I think they should have some government oversight to verify that they aren’t being biased,” Higgins said.
