Facebook fact-checking

I think I am in the minority on Zuckerberg’s decision to axe Facebook fact-checking. Most of the experts I admire disagree with me.

It would be naive to think Trump being president, and “Musk envy” had nothing to do with eliminating fact-checking.

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But there is merit to the decision.

In theory, all serious, non disingenuous people would agree fact-checking published material is desirable. But checking a journalist’s material is several orders of magnitude “easier“ than checking posts by a billion people in multiple languages. It is extremely labor intensive. Reportedly Facebook had 40,000 fact-checkers at one time (that is worldwide, multiple languages).

There are countless examples of Facebook fact-checkers being wrong.

Fact-checking also can never be real time, so the fact-checkers are always behind. People rarely see corrections, and if you remove a post, many have already seen it, and never know it was false.

Fact-checking will always be imperfect and costly at Facebook’s scale.

While Zuckerberg is being cynical when he cites free speech for his decision. Nonetheless, this again has merit for a couple of related reasons.

One, I would rather have mountains of false information than censorship. Two, It seems likely that the incoming president would be able to coerce Zuckerberg into slanting Facebook’s fact-checking.

The main problem with Facebook isn’t false information. Facebook is built to attract advertisers. It does that by amplifying inflammatory material, and gathering information about its users. It is fundamentally unethical, independent of whether it fact-checks.

With folks like Zuckerberg (and Musk) whom a lot of us despise, there is a knee jerk reaction to proclaim everything they do or say as also despicable.

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