Mark Zuckerberg recently announced some rather controversial changes to content moderation. Meta is eliminating fact checking in the US, replacing it with Community Notes.
This is a feature Meta is stealing from Twitter, no surprise. It allows the community to determine whether or not something is true.
I’ll withhold judgment on this feature for now, as skeptical as I may be. Meta’s fact checking wasn’t perfect, and there’s no reason to believe Community Notes will be either. But with Meta’s scale, MAYBE it could be effective.
We’ll see.
About Ads
The main point today is that, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal, Community Notes won’t apply to ads.
This is actually where Meta and X are different on the implementation of Community Notes. X applies it to both organic and paid content. That, as the Wall Street Journal reports, created some issues for advertisers.
That doesn’t mean that you should feel safe to lie in Meta ads without consequence, of course. Although that is certainly a concern now for bad actors.
But if you’re a good person who doesn’t lie in your ads, you don’t need to worry about a potentially flawed Community Notes product screwing things up. And that certainly would have been a concern, particularly for a new product as Meta figures it out.
