I regularly post these musings to several social media platforms each day, if for no other reason than to optimize reach. Methinks maybe aggregate enough followers by being shared by some who are moved enough to do so for potential advertisers to take notice. When I was first exposed to third party website measurement via Comscore more than a quarter-century ago I learned that one needed to have 50,000 impressions in a month to be minimally measurable. After more than three and a half years of being at this organically, I’m still a few thousand short of that minimum. C’est la vie.
Yet no matter what I may muse or where and how I choose to share in that quixotic quest for relevance, the only times I’ve had posts removed for “violating standards” even occasionally have been on Facebook. And those have been for many of my more benign posts. I’m not sure if I may have accidentally used a clickbait graphic that needed copyright acknowledgement or if something I wrote may have triggered someone or something somewhere. It’s never happened to me on LinkedIn, from which I garner the majority of my traffic, nor on Substack–my two “business-centric” platforms. And I’ll bet you’d be shocked when I tell you I’ve never had any problems with X–though it does appear I have minimal engagement from actual humans based upon the numbers and comments I’ve seen.
But that may about to be changed, if I’m to take yesterday’s announcement by Facebook’s founder at face value, which apparently moving forward will not necessarily be required. As PBS News Nation reported yesterday morning:
Facebook and Instagram owner Meta said Tuesday it’s scrapping its third-party fact-checking program and replacing it with Community Notes written by users similar to the model used by Elon Musk’s social media platform X. Starting in the U.S., Meta will end its fact-checking program with independent third parties. The company said it decided to end the program because expert fact checkers had their own biases and too much content ended up being fact checked.
Instead, it will pivot to a Community Notes model that uses crowdsourced fact-checking contributions from users.
“We’ve seen this approach work on X – where they empower their community to decide when posts are potentially misleading and need more context,” Meta’s Chief Global Affairs Officer Joel Kaplan said in a blog post. Kaplan said the new system will be phased in over the next couple of months, and the company will work on improving it over the year. As part of the transition, Meta will use labels to replace warnings overlaid on posts that it forces users to click through.
THE VERGE’s Adi Robertson was among the many with online pulpits who echoed and amplified the hundreds of similar reactions my own feeds were dominated by yesterday:
I have to commend Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his new policy chief Joel Kaplan on their timing. It’s not hugely surprising that, as the pair announced early today, Meta is giving up on professional third-party fact-checking. The operator of Facebook, Instagram, and Threads has been backing off moderation recently, and fact-checking has always been contentious. But it’s probably smart to do it two weeks before President-elect Donald Trump takes office — and nominates a Federal Communications Commission head who’s threatened the company over it.
Trump’s FCC chairman pick (and current FCC commissioner), Brendan Carr, is a self-identified free speech defender with a creative interpretation of the First Amendment. In mid-November, as part of a flurry of lightly menacing missives to various entities, Carr sent a letter to Meta, Apple, Google, and Microsoft attacking the companies’ fact-checking programs.
The letter was primarily focused on NewsGuard, a conservative bête noire that Meta doesn’t actually work with. But it also demanded information about “the use of any media monitor or fact checking service,” and it left no doubt about Carr’s position on them. “You participated in a censorship cartel that included not only technology and social media companies but advertising, marketing, and so-called “fact checking” organizations,” Carr wrote. The incoming Trump administration and Congress, he continued, will take “broad ranging actions … and those actions can include both a review of your companies’ activities as well as efforts by third-party organizations and groups that have acted to curtail those [speech] rights.”
Judging by what THE HILL’s Miranda Nazzaro reported yesterday, it sure seems like the head of said incoming administration was a bit more smug and self-flaggelating than usual when asked about his thoughts:
Trump suggested the changes had something to do with him, telling reporters Tuesday the decision was “probably” in response to his previous threats against Zuckerberg and the company.
“Honestly, I think they’ve come a long way — Meta, Facebook, I think they’ve come a long way,” he said, adding that he watched a Fox News interview with Meta’s head of policy, Joel Kaplan, and he was “impressive.”
I can’t for the life of me think of a single business-centric reason why this turn of events went down. According to Statista, in 2024 Facebook has 3.065 billion monthly active users. Twitter/X: 611 million. Throw in Meta’s other communications tools such as Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger and that number goes north of 8 billion. That’s a more than 12-fold advantage in actual traffic.
And as THE FREE PRESS’ River Page noted in his newsletter this morning, Zuckerberg issued a mea culpa over video…while wearing a $900,000 watch. As evidenced by his attire at a Congressional hearing, he apparently does own something besides hoodies to wear over his shirts. So it’s not like we have to go out and run him a benefit anytime soon.
But he still pales in net worth to the schmo that runs that competitive platform and, more significantly, he’s already got an in with the big guy. And that’s especially significant considering that that’s the same schmo that notably challenged him to a “cage fight” in 2022 which, of course, never actually happened. But if you are familiar with what apparently prompted Zuck to enter this crazy world in the first place, it’s challenges to his manhood that have apparently motivated him from the getgo. As the Wikipedia description of the plot for 2010’s THE SOCIAL NETWORK, the seminal work that described the founding of what was originally called Thefacebook reads:
On October 28, 2003, 19-year-old Harvard University sophomore Mark Zuckerberg is dumped by his girlfriend, Erica Albright. Returning to his dorm, Zuckerberg writes an insulting post about Albright on his LiveJournal blog. He creates a campus website called Facemash by hacking and downloading photos of female students from house face books, then allowing site visitors to rate their attractiveness.
So it shouldn’t be all that shocking when just as this policy shift is being announced, Page also reported the following addition to the Metaverse:
On Monday came the news that Dana White, CEO of Ultimate Fighting Championship, would be joining Meta’s board. A longtime friend of Trump, White made a notable cameo at Trump’s election night victory party, thanking a motley crew of podcasters and streamers like Joe Rogan, Adin Ross, and Theo Von—mainstays of the young male mainstream media who helped deliver Trump the election, as I argued in November.
Maybe he plans to get in a cage with big bad Elon sometime soon? Or at least more impressively lie about the possibility about it happening?
After all, lying seems to be the best way to get really rich and powerful, now more than ever. It helped get Fat Orange Jesus elected for a second term, right? And it certainly got Musk a lot more significant of a bromance than the Zuck has been able to previously curry, even when he’s all dressed to the nines during his D.C. visits.
Zuck may have found his soulmate in Priscilla Chan, and supposedly can handle himself decently in an octagon. But he does seem to have a very long memory and a penchant for hiding. The entire rebranding to Meta was a nod to a world of avatars and virtual reality he dreamed up as an alternative when the world was in lockdown and time spent on his platforms–and others’–skyrocketed. The announcement video which featured his audition for the next James Cameron epic is something that remains etched in my mind and can’t be unseen.
So if X is now the “town square” of vox populi, it appears that Facebook will now try to be the world’s crossroads–no guard rails, no silly encumbrances like facts and reality to get in the way of “freedom of speech”. We’ll soon see if there’s enough of an influx of humans who have eschewed the Metaverse to offset the degree of cancellations that were already being threatened by many in my feeds within minutes of yesterday’s news.
But do note that the mass exodus of tweeters and Washington Post subscribers haven’t yet made a dent in either the profits or the psyches of those running those businesses. And the odds are overwhelming that they never will. Maybe you may feel personally more cleansed by posting your thoughts on Bluesky and those family reunion and foodie pics might fit nicely into that feed. But please save any expression you might be inclined to make of a significant statement being made via your actions for your own private musings. Certainly, that’s how Mr. Thefacebook is opting to roll.
And who knows? Maybe I’ll finally be able to post something like this on his platform without interruption. I suppose if you found this there this morning I could be on my way.
Until next time…