Get the latest tech news

Meta Is Taking All the Wrong Lessons From X

By abandoning fact-checkers and loosening its Hateful Conduct policy, Meta has made clear the future it wants for its platforms.

“Meta has perennially been a home for Russian, Chinese, and Iranian disinformation,” claims Gordon Crovitz, co-CEO of NewsGuard, a company that provides a tool to evaluate the trustworthiness of online information. And while X gets outsize attention in part because of Musk, remember that it’s an order of magnitude smaller than Facebook’s 3 billion monthly active users, which will present its own challenges when Meta installs its own community notes-style system.“There’s a reason there’s only one Wikipedia in the world,” says Matzarlis. But between the moderation changes and the community guidelines overhaul, Facebook, Instagram, and Threads are careening toward a world where anyone can say that gay and trans people have a “ mental illness,” where AI slop will proliferate even more aggressively, where outrageous claims spread unchecked, where truth itself is malleable.

Get the Android app