Last Wednesday Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Meta, the company that owns Facebook, announced sweeping changes to the company’s online content moderation policies. This controversial move is likely to prove harmful to the company’s profitability in the long term.
In effect, Zuckerberg, whose $1.3-trillion company owns the Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and Snapchat social media platforms, has removed professional fact-checking. Fact-checking will be replaced by “community notes”, an unprofessional service that adds comments from readers/users.
Controversially, he also sacked Nick Clegg, the former British deputy prime minister and leader of the Liberal Democrats, as his global policy chief. He replaced Clegg with a Republican, Joel Kaplan, days ahead of Donald Trump’s inauguration as America’s 47th president.
He has also donated generously to Trump’s inauguration celebrations. Worse, it seems all these decisions were made without consultation with his inner circle.
In their justification for the changes his apologists say Zuckerberg has always been a proponent of freedom of expression and anticensorship. This is a self-serving argument. Even if it was true, its timing lends credence to the theory that he is seeking to curry favour with the US president-elect.
He is not the only one as American billionaires are lining up to appease Trump — the most high-profile subject of content moderation. Elon Musk, the former South African and Trump ally, has been cosying up to Trump and even funded his election campaign. More are likely to follow suit in coming months.
Meta’s January 8 announcement has divided public opinion. Quite correctly, most fear this will be a licence for hate speech mongers and spreaders of fake news. That nudity, violence, sexism, racism and so on will go unpoliced. This is probably correct.
But this assumes, wrongly, that fact-checking employed by social media platform owners — at great cost — has been effective. It has not. Fact-checkers have got it wrong far too often. Still, the effort was worth it in heightening public awareness about the abuse on these platforms.
Like other past technological advances, social media technology was not immune to abuse. Though largely unproven, widespread claims are abound that developed countries’ governments have been using technology to orchestrate regime change outside their borders.
Trump’s first term, as the 45th president of the US, is suspected to have been delivered with the help of external forces. Last year the world found out the hard way the effect of the nonchalant attitude of the so-called platform owners when riots spread like wildfire in the UK, fuelled by fake news disseminated on social media.
The “community notes” — Zuckerberg’s replacement of fact- checkers — is a blunt tool to democratically moderate online content. After all, people go online for other reasons than to provide a public service such as fact-checking.
Not only did Zuckerberg blindside his internal team, he also took advertisers, the lifeline of his company, by surprise. The advertising world is still mulling the impact of the changes announced on January 8.
Initial responses are suggesting panic and shock in an industry that has largely deserted newspapers in favour of technology giants such as Meta and X (formerly Twitter), which is owned by Musk. He has already started making money out of the Trump presidency and been rewarded with an ill-defined job to cut US government inefficiency.
Zuckerberg’s announcement is helpful in other respects. At least the world now knows where he stands: he is, unashamedly, a Trump supporter. This makes a mockery of claims that his platforms are not content generators, and are merely channels.
For years as he was cannibalising newspapers by freely circulating their content, arguing that his platforms, such as Google, are merely conduits. Over time advertisers left newspapers for these new platforms.
Governments in various jurisdictions have tried, and mostly failed, to regulate billionaires like Zuckerberg. Now they know he is not only a channel but a player. It will be infinitely more difficult for him to walk back on this claim now. He cannot avoid accountability.
However, regulators have their work cut out for them. They need to know their story before launching a new accountability drive against the likes of Zuckerberg. The “community notes” are unlikely to prove effective in slowing the spread of fake news.
In the fullness of time though, Zuckerberg’s changes may prove to be a blessing in disguise for newspapers. It is unlikely that ethical advertisers will risk a backlash against their products and services arising from being published next to hate speech.
Newspaper editors are there to moderate content. They are the last line of defence between readers and product consumers and hate speech and false claims.
For years newspaper workers have been told they are irrelevant. In the recent election Trump ignored “legacy” media. Other than Fox News, he preferred face-to-face rallies, including the one that nearly took his life.
In the fullness of time Zuckerberg’s announcement may fundamentally change how media is consumed. But it all depends on how advertisers respond to the changes: it will be in vain if, in the end, advertisers show indifference to hate speech and false news.
• Dludlu, a former editor of The Sowetan, is CEO of the Small Business Institute.
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