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Fact checkers have arrived at Threads.
This early in the game, Meta’s Threads is trying to get ahead of the problem that the upcoming elections will inevitably bring: political discussions and the proliferation of fake news.
Meta is doing this by contracting a few fact-checking organisations in certain regions to flag and provide fact check notes, similar to how it is being implemented in Elon Musk-owned X.
This is a noted departure from Meta’s stance in the aftermath of the 2016 presidential elections, when CEO Mark Zuckerberg downplayed the idea of Facebook impacting the elections.
At the time, Zuckerberg called the suggestion a “crazy idea.”
Since then, however, the social media giant has worked with a global network of fact-checkers to address the issues of misinformation inside the platform.
“Since 2016, our fact-checking program has expanded to include more than 90 organisations working in more than 60 languages globally. The focus of the program is to address viral misinformation – particularly clear hoaxes that have no basis in fact. Fact-checking partners prioritize provably false claims that are timely, trending and consequential,” Meta said.
One of such organisations is Facta, an Italian newspaper that currently provides notes for content specific to the Italian audience. In Australia, Meta works with the Australian Associated Press, RMIT Fact Lab, and AFP Fact Check, a department within Agence France-Press.
This preference for professional fact checkers and news organisations is a noted departure from the approach favoured by Musk, who instead relies on crowdsourced Community Notes.
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Musk has famously likened fact checking by journalists and professional organizations as akin to “censorship” and instead prefers to trust in the “wisdom of the crowds.”
“But importantly, with Community Notes, everything is open source. So, you can see the software—every line of the software, all the data that went into a Community Note—and you can independently create that Community Note. If you see manipulation of the data, you can highlight that and say, “Well, this has to be some gaming of the system,” and you can suggest improvements. It’s maximum transparency, combined with the wisdom of the crowds,” Musk said in 2023.
