Meta made a number of changes to suck up to Yambo. The company ended its fact-checking program in the United States, stopped scanning new posts for most policy violations, and created carve-outs in its community standards to allow nasty speech about transgender people and immigrants. (Naturally, the company also sacrificed its DEI program on the Altar Of Orange.) Via Platformer.com:
Behind the scenes, the company was also quietly dismantling a system to prevent the spread of misinformation. When the company announced on Jan. 7 that it would end its fact-checking partnerships, the company also instructed teams responsible for ranking content in the company’s apps to stop penalizing misinformation, according to sources and an internal document obtained by Platformer.
The result is that the sort of viral hoaxes that ran roughshod over the platform during the 2016 US presidential election — “Pope Francis endorses Trump,” Pizzagate, and all the rest — are now just as eligible for free amplification on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads as true stories.
In 2016, of course, Meta hadn’t yet invested huge sums in machine-learning classifiers that can spot when a piece of viral content is likely a hoax. But nine years later, after the company’s own analyses found that these classifiers could reduce the reach of these hoaxes by more than 90 percent, Meta is shutting them off.
Isn’t that sweet. Figure out some alternate delivery system for pictures of your family, and get the hell off toxic Meta products. If I find a good one, I’ll let you know.
