Did you hear that Nasa is hiding a mysterious Planet X, also known as Nibiru, which will soon crash into Earth bringing Apocalypse?
Not only that, but the world is ruled by lizards, and Finland does’t really exist?
These are some of the wild claims which have gained traction on Facebook in recent years, but which professional factcheckers will have flagged as misinformation.
From today, however, a major change is taking place in our social media platforms, as users will be left to do the fact checking themselves.
Meta company officially ended its fact checking programme in the US today.
The humans employed to take action on fake news and conspiracy theories will be replaced with ‘Community Notes’ style comments on Facebook, Instagram and Threads, if enough users flag posts as problematic.
While this is just in the States for now, the move is intended to later expand worldwide after it is improved ‘over the course of the year’.
Facebook has gained a reputation for questionable viral posts shared by ‘Boomers’, including AI-generated images sucha as Santorini turned into a giant water park for adults, or cakes that defy the laws of gravity.
These fake posts can also be much more sinister, such as an influx of false reports of missing children, or deadly snakes on the loose, which were posted in local community groups.
Two years ago, an investigation by fact-checking charity Full Fact found over a thousand posts like this, warning that it could be the ‘tip of the iceberg’.
Jon Clay, a VP in threat intelligence at Trend Micro, told Metro that we should prepare for an ‘army’ of scam bots as AI makes it much easier to create convincing false content.
So it’s likely we will need more tools to help spot misinformation and scams – not less.
External fact checkers were first hired to check Facebook’s site content in 2016, after controversy over the easy spread of false information on the platform.
But after Donald Trump took office, heavily influenced by Elon Musk who owns rival platform X, social media sites have raced to overhaul their policies in favour of free speech and loosened content moderation.
After Musk took over X, he introduced a ‘community notes’ system and loosened rules about permitted topics.
Meta’s chief global affairs officer Joel Kaplan wrote on X last week: ‘By Monday afternoon, our fact-checking program in the US will be officially over. That means no new fact checks and no fact checkers.
‘We announced in January we’d be winding down the program & removing penalties.
‘In place of fact checks, the first Community Notes will start appearing gradually across Facebook, Threads & Instagram, with no penalties attached.’
Announcing the changes in January, Mark Zuckerberg said that too many posts were mistakenly being flagged as misinformation, irritating users.
Comedian Mo Gilligan was a victim of this when he made a joke about florists charging over the odds on Mother’s Day and was swiftly ‘shadow banned’ from Instagram for ‘false information’ about US migrants.
Zuckerberg said they had invested in ‘increasingly complex’ content mangement ‘partly in response to societal and political pressure’.
He said: ‘This approach has gone too far. As well-intentioned as many of these efforts have been, they have expanded over time to the point where we are making too many mistakes, frustrating our users and too often getting in the way of the free expression we set out to enable.
‘Too much harmless content gets censored, too many people find themselves wrongly locked up in “Facebook jail,” and we are often too slow to respond when they do.
‘We want to fix that and return to that fundamental commitment to free expression.’
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