01/09/2025

The X-ification of Meta

Meta is taking all the wrong lessons from X

It is a social networking company with close ties to the incoming Trump administration. It deploys a "community notes" system to fight misinformation and lets hateful comments fly under the banner of "free speech." It's got a hefty side-gig in AI. It's setting up shop in Texas. It’s run by a guy worth hundreds of billions of dollars and the fashion sense of someone a couple of decades younger. No, not X. It’s Meta.

It may soon be hard to tell the difference. Meta this week said it would torpedo its fact-checking partners in favor of X’s “community notes” model (a comparison Meta chief global policy officer Joel Kaplan made directly in a blog post yesterday) and used the fig leaf of “free speech” to make alarmingly permissive changes to its Hateful Conduct policy. Last week, it appointed friend of Donald Trump and Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO Dana White to its board, and elevated Kaplan, who is firmly entrenched in Republican circles.

"I've been expecting Meta to axe this program for years," said Alexios Matzarlis, director of Cornell University's Security, Trust and Safety Initiative and founding director of the International Fact-Checking Network, which helped establish the partnership between Facebook and fact-checkers in 2016. "But not in this manner and with this timing, which is so nakedly political."

Please select this link to read the complete article from WIRED.