Meta’s recent announcement is not just about the rollout of Community Notes, following their fellow platforms X and YouTube – it is a systematic lowering of the bar on how Meta intends to enforce their Community Standards against hate speech and harassment online. Given the mounting evidence of how hate speech, incendiary content and harassment lead to real-world harm including hate crimes, terror attacks and child suicide, CyberWell is deeply concerned at the purposeful deterioration of Trust & Safety best practices at Meta.
Mark Zuckerburg’s statement openly indicates that hate speech will no longer automatically be flagged, placing event more onus on the users of Meta’s platforms to report when they are targeted for their identity online in violation of the platform’s rules, but without making any commitments of developing more robust resources available to them or guaranteeing a higher probability of a human content moderator will even review their report. This change means one thing, very in line with the trend of both the quantity and quality of content that we have seen on X since Musk acquired Twitter – more hate speech, more politicized content, more silos and less effective responses from the platforms.
This change particularly undermines the safety of all marginalized communities, including the Jewish community which is currently experiencing one of the worst onslaughts of widespread Jew-hatred in both online and offline spaces.
For the Jewish community this means that Meta is making it easier for antisemitism to flourish online. It will likely lead to an uptick in hate-posting, harassment and even a migration of white supremacists and extreme racists onto Meta’s platforms much like during the period immediately following the Twitter acquisition.
While the previous fact-checking system has proven to be an ineffective and unscalable method of combatting misinformation and disinformation during real-time conflicts and emergencies, the answer cannot be less accountability and less investment from the side of the platforms.
This is not a victory for free speech – it’s an exchange of human bias in a small and contained group of fact-checkers for human bias at scale through Community Notes. The only way to prevent censorship and data manipulation by any government or corporation would be to institute legal requirements and reforms on big tech that enforce social media reform and transparency requirements.
