Already, and this is the daily This is the Daily OS. Oh, now it makes sense. Good morning, and welcome to the Daily OS. It's Thursday, the ninth of January. I'm Zara, I'm Sam. Yesterday, Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg announced major changes to the company's social media moderation policies. In a video posted to socials, Zuckerberg said Meta would no longer use independent fact checkers in a move to restore what he called free expression for its users, and also to reduce
the number of mistakes he believed had been made. It's a significant departure for the social media behemoth and has drawn praise from ex owner Elon Musk and incoming US President Donald Trump.
It's crazy to think that there was a time without Meta. I mean yeah, it's pretty much one of the companies that shapes the twenty first century.
Evasive in every part of my life.
And it's continuing to change.
My partner on Meta, and my business exists on Meta. One hundred percent hit rate for Meta.
It's in every part of our lives. And that's why these changes are so important to talk about. Before we get to the changes themselves, what was the state of play before this announcement.
Yeah, So since twenty sixteen, Meta has used what it called third party moderators to essentially identify false claims, misinformation, disinformation, and hoaxes on all of its platforms, so across Facebook, Instagram,
and WhatsApp. In his video, Zuckerberg said that after Donald Trump won the election back in twenty sixteen, so not this most recent time, but back then, he said that legacy media wrote NonStop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy, and Zuckerberg said that Meta, as a result of all of that discourse and as a result of I guess that concern, he said that Meta tried in
good faith to address those concerns. And that's why these fact checkers were in introduced in the first place as an almost response to the election of Donald Trump, which is an interesting point that we'll get to a bit later. And so the way that it has worked up until now is that these moderation teams, and there's about ninety organizations across dozens of countries who work as part of these teams. What they do is look very closely at content that either they or other users have identified as
being false or misleading. So you, as a user can identify something, can click and say this is hate speech or this is misinformation or whatever it is. That's then reviewed by these people. The moderators then rate the accuracy of the post based on their factual review, and med can then add a warning label and the fact check is rating to the posts and then reduce its distribution, so affect how that post can be seen across the algorithm.
And that's where you also see those kind of lighter boxes underneath the post that says this might not be true. Here's a link to a government website. Remember, particularly in the pandemic, there was a lot of those underneath posts about vaccines or about the spread of the virus. So that's the way it's worked until now. Talk me through what Mark Zuckerberg announced via a short video yesterday and what his thinking was behind this one eighty.
I mean, to the thinking point. It is fairly rare that Mark Zuckerberg takes us through his thinking on something. There are a lot of high profile people who work at metas so when it comes to Instagram, Adamisari is the head of Instagram and he's announced a lot of the changes. But this came clearly from the top, and it makes sense. It's a huge change. So essentially, the biggest change among them is that those fact checkers that I was just talking about, the ones who are reviewing the content.
The ninety organization, Yes, they're no.
Longer gone done goodbye. And to add some color as to why overnight we have seen the exit of all fact checking on these platforms, Zuckerberg described the system as complex, and he said that it was creating too many mistakes. Said, even if they accidentally censor just one percent of posts, that is millions of people. Now I'm going to applay you a short clip that explains a bit more about the thinking behind the decision.
There's been widespread debate about potential harms from online content. Governments and legacy media have pushed to censor more and more. So we built a lot of complex systems to moderate content. But the problem with complex systems is they make mistakes. The fact checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they've created, especially in the US. So over the next couple of months, we're going to phase in a more comprehensive community notes system.
So let's play this out right. We're talking about a post being reported as missiles disinformation, this third party fact checking service looking at it and deciding it was in fact, it's then limiting the reach of that And in Mark Zackberg's mind, that is then limiting the reach of that post, where if the fact checker's got that wrong, it actually shouldn't have been limited in the first place. And I guess it's why that concern is around sense, right.
Yeah, well, I mean, yeah, censorship is really at the heart of the reasoning behind removing these fact checkers. And I guess the way that Mark Zuckerberg sees it is that the people, the fact checkers, who are deciding whether or not something is miss or disinformation, he is claiming that they are becoming the arbiters of truth, and that Meta itself never wanted to be the arbiter of truth.
It wanted to be a social media platform, or Facebook at least wanted to be a social media platform where lots of different ideas and social connections could be fostered. And what he's saying is that it has now gone too far and it's now impeding on freedom of speech
and the principles that underpin that. And to that end, Meta has also said it's getting rid of a number of restrictions on topics, so things like immigration, gender identity, and gender that have been the subject of frequent political discourse. A statement from Meta said, it's not right that things can be said on TV or on the floor of Congress but not on Beta.
So essentially, Zara, does that mean that people can now post anything they want on metal platforms.
It's certainly going to be easier to post what you like and what you think, but it's not going to be a free for all. Instead, the onus is going to shift from fact checkers to the users themselves. Now, this idea is modeled on the way that X so Twitter that's owned by Elon Musk, the way that that platform has treated miss and disinformation, and that's been through the introduction of something called community notes. Essentially community notes.
If you've been on x recently, it's that little thing that comes up at the end of a tweet and it says community note so and so xyz is wrong. And the way that this is done is that X users basically fact check each other. Essentially, if two users so me and you, okay, if me and you, let's use you you and I, so you and I have previously disagreed on whether the sky is blue.
I say it's green, you say it's blue.
Yeah, And then there's another fact that's posted about whether or not Anthony Albanezi is the Prime Minister, and you and I agree on that. That is then going to be published as a community note because previously we've disagreed, Now we agree on the same thing. And that is the way at least that X. I know it's super confusing, but that's the way that X has said that. It's
like prioritizing diverse voices and diverse perspectives. Is that if you and I agree on every single thing and we have the same political positions and therefore critique something else as miss or disinformation, you're ending up in the same situation. So that's the way X does it. I hope that
that makes sense. I'm not on the back end of X, so look, I can't actually tell you the technology that goes behind it, but essentially what they're trying to say is that that same idea is going to be brought in on meta platforms.
Okay, so basically via a lot of complex algorithms. It's on users. Now, you're not on these third part the TLDs checking services to identify whether something on meta platforms is factually wrong correct.
And that's the way it's been done on X. And you know X has changed, It's completely transformed from the app at once was, so I think that we can expect to see the meta platforms also change quite significantly under this announcement.
And Zara, we can't ignore the wider context that's happening around us, which is the election of Donald Trump for a second term. He's being sworn in on the twentieth. Meta isn't the only company in the world readying itself for a Trump presidency. Can you talk to me about how Donald Trump fits into all of this.
Yeah, Look, it's an absolutely fascinating one because Mark Zuckerberg explicitly said in his video that he was going to work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world pushing to censor more So, there was a very clear nod to the incoming president elect Donald Trump there, and the fact that you know he is looking to work with him and be on the same side when
it comes to censorship, I guess as Trump. But what's interesting is that the two absolutely have not always seen eida eye you know, Trump previously threatened to jals Zuckerberg if he did anything quote illegal during the twenty twenty four election, and at a press conference after the announcement, Trump said that this threat was probably responsible for Meta's decision. We can't test the validity of that. We are not inside,
you know, the Meta decision making rooms. But I do think that it's important to, I guess, highlight some of the interesting changes that have happened at Meta recently that, as you say, do demonstrate the fact that it is readying itself for a Trump presidency. So two things that were of note. The first is that Dana White, who was the creator of UFC, he was this week appointed to Meta's board.
And he's very close to the Trump camp, right.
Yeah, yeah. He is a full Trump loyalist to the extent that when Donald Trump won the presidency back in November, he was on stage on the night of the election, so very close to the president elect, and that means something. He wrote this kind of explanation of being appointed to the board and he said, I don't do boards, but I want to do this board. So a really interesting thing there. The second is that the head of Global Affairs, so global affairs is essentially the way that a company
connects and engages with government. That person at META was replaced this week and the new head, his name is George Kaplan, has close ties to Trump and is also understood to have played a significant role in the announcement yesterday.
It's really interesting how Meta is getting ready for this Trump presidency. They're not the only company that's doing so, as I said, and these decisions are going to impact millions of people, not just in America but all the way around the world. What has the response been to this announcement.
Well, I thought I'd focus on the response from the fact checking groups. You know, I said that they were in ninety Yeah, there were ninety organizations who were involved in fact checking who overnight must have lost huge contracts and also, you know, believe truly in their role and the value that they can bring. So one of the groups, the Pointer Institute, said in a statement that facts are
not censorship. They said it's time to quit invoking inflammatory and false language in describing the role of journalists and fact checking, not mincing words there. FactCheck dot Org, which has also been used by Meta, said that community notes model will mean that you'll have to do more work
on your own when you see questionable posts. I think that that's an interesting note to end on, which is, you know, how much critical analysis, how much literacy are we bringing to the online world and to our experience on the online world, because the meta and the Twitter of twenty fourteen is very different today, and you know, here in Australia we're heading into an election campaign where we know young voters are going to be met online
and especially on socials and meta platforms. So understanding how this might affect us down the road is definitely to keep an eye on.
Well, the onus is kind of now more on us than that before. Yep, Zara, thank you. That's a very interesting and slightly complex discussion on how fact checking works and is evolving into the future. We'll be back again with the headlines this afternoon, but until then, have a fantastic day, which out to you later. My name is Lily Maddon and I'm a proud Arunda Bunjelung Kalkutin woman
from Gadighl Country. The Daily oz acknowledges that this podcast is recorded on the lands of the Gadighl people and pays respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island and nations. We pay our respects to the first peoples of these countries, both past and present.