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Mark Zuckerberg’s End to Meta Factchecking is a Desperate Play for Engagement

As factchecking attempts end, it’s a guarantee Meta’s platforms will become a wasteland of fake news and misinformation

Mark Zuckerberg craves one metric more than any other: engagement, the statistic that tracks how long social media users spend scrolling, clicking, commenting, and viewing ads. “Absent the moderating force of factchecking, we’ll see more content that’s hyper-partisan, vitriolic, and hostile,” said Dr Cody Buntain, an assistant professor at the University of Maryland who studies social media disinformation. In 2016, Meta vice-president Andrew Bosworth argued in an email that inciting suicides and terrorist attacks was an acceptable price to pay for the “de facto” benefits of connecting users.

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