When Mark Zuckerberg earnestly looked at a camera and told the world (or US president-elect Donald Trump) that he was shutting down all fact-checking on Facebook and Instagram, he left out some important context.
His changes would only apply to US users, just as the EU rolls out a law to target disinformation. There is a couple of ways to look at that. If you believe that Facebook’s work on content moderation has been a form of censorship, then Americans would be blessed with new freedom in Zuckerberg’s vibrant public square. If you think it has protected people from toxicity, you would pity the Americans. Either way, you are going to experience social media differently, depending on which side of an ocean you are on.
Meta Platforms’ fact-checking policies, of course, had problems, illustrated by examples the company provided by fellow Bloomberg Opinion columnist Dave Lee, but the cause was not “political bias,” which Zuckerberg cited without evidence as the reason for shutting the operation down. It was inept decisionmaking.
It would have been more sensible for Zuckerberg to order an upgrade of his fact-checking systems to allow for more nuance, and invest more money in the effort, but the Facebook founder is an opportunist at heart. He jumps on new fads and copies his rivals, and he was bound to take the most politically expedient action when Trump was elected.
With the fact-checkers leaving, along with the “false information” labels they slapped on the occasional post, US users of Facebook and Instagram would be able to join a voluntary system, similar to X’s Community Notes feature, and fact-check each other instead.
Community Notes is not a terrible idea, but does the system work? It depends who you ask. While academic research has shown it can counter some vaccine misinformation and help users distinguish misleading posts, the notes themselves can be slow to implement, and half-truths can go viral by the time they are debated and posted.
Alan Rusbridger and Khaled Mansour, who sit on Meta’s Oversight Board, which deals with content disputes, on Thursday last week wrote in an op-ed piece in Prospect that they do not believe in the model.
“If this model of community notes had applied in Britain at the time of the Southport riots last year, there would have been no one to arbitrate on wild rumors about the identity or religion of the alleged assailant: The truth would take second place to the competing claims of whoever wished to pitch in,” they wrote.
What is more certain is that the experience of Facebook and Instagram would become more geographically fragmented, and not just because of the fact-checkers. Meta AI assistant, which had close to 500 million monthly active users as of September last year, has been delayed in the EU because of concern from the region’s top privacy regulator about using people’s data to train its artificial intelligence (AI) models.
Zuckerberg apparently pities Europeans for missing out.
“It’s sad that I basically have to tell our teams to launch our new AI advances everywhere except the EU at this point,” he wrote on Threads last month. Meta said it represented a “step backwards for European innovation.”
Of course it does not. European innovation is not defined by a large Silicon Valley company giving consumers a widget in exchange for their data. Chatbots collect far more personal details than Google queries ever did, and Meta collects the prompts that people type into its AI. (Meta said that it “may collect and use information, such as your text prompt and generated responses, to improve how our artificial intelligence models work.”)
Maybe it is not the worst outcome for Europeans to miss out on another data-mining operation, until it has been set up to handle their details appropriately. What Zuckerberg frames as a regulatory barrier is a foundation for building public trust in AI systems.
Meta likely would not apply the EU’s new rules on disinformation, known as the Digital Services Act, on Americans, several legal experts say. Doing so would be politically costly for Zuckerberg, particularly when Trump lashes out (and he will) at EU officials for fining companies such as Meta or Google that breach the new law.
That might mark a new era for how social media giants follow European rules. In 2018, when the EU launched its General Data Protection Regulation to protect online privacy, many companies made changes globally because running separate systems was too complex and expensive. However, the “Brussels effect” might now be weakening, as corporate leaders such as Zuckerberg find it more valuable to run their platforms in a more fragmented way and placate government officials on opposite sides of the ocean.
Meta’s changes would not be quite as dramatic as the “Great Firewall,” which has seen China develop a completely siloed Internet culture, but they could spell a decoupling of relations between US and European Internet users over the coming years. Amid growing tensions over trade and territory, that might not be the healthiest direction to go.
Parmy Olson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering technology. A former reporter for the Wall Street Journal and Forbes, she is the author of Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT, and the Race That Will Change the World. This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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