Reddit’s co-founder says Meta’s decision to end third-party fact-checking on its platforms was a “pragmatic” one, characterizing the move as a reversal of an unviable program.
In January, just days before Donald Trump was sworn in as U.S. president for the second time, Meta announced it would end third-party fact-checking on its platforms, a program often criticized by Trump and conservatives for what they say unfairly targeted right-wing content.
In a series of sweeping policy changes at the media giant, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced he would install a community-based system instead.
“It was a very pragmatic change,” Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian told CNBC at the Web Summit in Qatar on Sunday, adding “it is impossible to do fact-checking at scale, let alone in real time, as Facebook was trying to do.”
“In many ways, I think they were just winding back something that was a bad idea from the start because it was untenable,” Ohanian added.
Meta launched its global fact-checking program in 2016 in a bid to tackle misinformation, and has since partnered with fact-checking organizations in more than 100 countries. The rollback will begin in the U.S., according to the company, and will not affect other countries yet.
The Reddit co-founder, who created the “front page of the internet” in 2005, also weighed in on the future of social media. “I think we’ll get to a place where we as users get to choose our algorithms, and because, without a doubt, these platforms, we’re all incentivized to have the best possible algorithm, not because of anything sinister, but because we want to keep people engaged,” he said.
Reddit, which went public in March last year and was valued at $6.4 billion, was one of the first social networking platforms, and began when MySpace still dominated user’s screens. Reddit has struggled with moderation in its own history, eventually banning revenge porn, and cracking down on racism and misogyny in its communities. Today, the platform has over 70 million daily active users, and boasts “community-specific rules” across individual communities, or subreddits.
‘More personalized approach’
In a post about Meta’s new content moderation policies, Joel Kaplan, Meta’s chief global affairs officer, wrote, “Starting in the US, we are ending our third party fact-checking program and moving to a Community Notes model.”
Kaplan added that Meta would “take a more personalized approach to political content, so that people who want to see more of it in their feeds can.”
The community notes model is also favored by Elon Musk-owned X, which says it aims to “create a better informed world by empowering people on X to collaboratively add context to potentially misleading posts.”
Kaplan praised X’s success with the model, saying “We’ve seen this approach work on X – where they empower their community to decide when posts are potentially misleading and need more context, and people across a diverse range of perspectives decide what sort of context is helpful for other users to see.”
Kaplan, a prominent Republican who replaced Nick Clegg at Meta, added that “Meta’s platforms are built to be places where people can express themselves freely. That can be messy. On platforms where billions of people can have a voice, all the good, bad and ugly is on display. But that’s free expression.”
After Trump’s inauguration, Zuckerberg joined a number of major American firms in ending programs designed for diversity, equity and inclusion. The Meta boss recently expressed regret over some of the company’s decisions in a letter to Congress, in which he said the Biden Administration had pressured Meta into censoring certain content around Covid-19.