Photo: Serge Tenani / Hans Lucas via AFP
Experts are concerned changes to content moderation and an end to third-party fact checking on social media platform Meta will leave users open to abuse and disinformation.
Chief executive of the company which owns Facebook, Instagram and Threads, Mark Zuckerberg, announced a number of big changes on Tuesday which would significantly alter the way content is moderated, including getting rid of fact checkers and replacing them with user-generated "community notes," similar to Elon Musk's platform X.
Zuckerberg himself acknowledged a "tradeoff" in the new policy, noting more harmful content would appear on the platform as a result.
Community notes will allow users to add context and corrections, rather than allowing subject matter experts working as part of certified, regulated agencies to check and flag false information.
Researcher for the now wound-up Disinformation Project, Dr Sanjana Hattotuwa, said it would be catastrophic for countries outside the US.
"To take away fact checking will have - and I want to say this very, very clearly - catastrophic consequences in Meta's largest markets which are outside the US, in countries like India and the Philippines, where the platform has been historically associated with significant offline violence."
In New Zealand, pulling back on content moderation would remove protection for vulnerable and often targeted groups such as Māori, the rainbow community and women.
"You can now see things that were not allowed in the past, such as denigrating, dehumanising speech, calling women objects and objectifying them, all of that is now permissable."
He said Meta was unlikely to receive pushback on the change from the incoming Trump administration, but it raised questions for users in New Zealand.
"It is an open question as to whether public service broadcasters, brands which have brand trust associated with them, LGBTQIA+ communities and activists, but also elected officials in liberal democracies, whether any of them should be using these kinds of platforms which are now openly associated with [...] significant harms against particular individuals, communities, languages and communities," he said.
Senior lecturer in philosophy at Waikato University, Dr Joseph Ulatowski, said abandoning all fact checking was a mistake.
"We can't possibly know everything about many different things," he said. "There's just too much information out there for us to know.
"Given we can't know all of these different things [...] there have to be others out there who know a great deal about certain things to share with others."
He said the move was deeply political, with proponents of fact checking tending to reflect the left side of the political spectrum.
Proponents of community notes tended to lean right, more in favour of leaving individual users to make up their minds, rather than relying on advice from experts.
In New Zealand, that political divide was less intense, but there were still a number of contentious issues which could become inflamed by disinformation.
He said the optimistic view was that relying on community notes would mean people who disagreed would engage with each other, and the facts would surface - but in reality, it would mean the removal of quick and easy access to reliable evidence and information.
"That is a deep concern for the civilised world," he said. "Mis- and disinformation will continue to circulate [...] and it may even be the case that it becomes widely accepted. That's deeply problematic in a knowledge-based economy."
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