What Zuckerberg Risks by Following Musk’s Lead

On Tuesday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the social media behemoth will end its third party fact-checking program in the U.S. and instead adopt a crowd-sourced “community notes” program. The inspiration for such a decision? Elon Musk’s X.

“We’ve seen this approach work on X,” said Joel Kaplan, Meta’s Chief Global Affairs Officer in a statement.

Thanks to the likes of Musk and Zuckerberg, social media is simply getting worse. Much, much worse. While that reality might have once sounded ludicrous, it’s the unfortunate result of tech tsars flooding their products with useless, and sometimes hateful, content. 

The erosion of content moderation

More than two years into Musk’s tenure leading Twitter, which he renamed X, the world’s richest person has remade the platform in his image: unapologetically unfiltered at best, and arguably bigoted at worst. Musk rolled back many of the rules for user-generated content that long governed the platform. For instance, he reinstated Donald Trump’s account after he was banned for inciting violence on January 6, 2021; ended the ban on spreading COVID-19 misinformation; and allowed users to once again harass transgender people by misgendering them.

And he has also awarded extra reach to paying users (including many of his sycophantic supporters), dismantled important safety tools like blocking (people can still see your tweets even if you block them), and tasked his users with sifting fact from fiction on the platform. 

Now, X’s community notes, a system started under prior management under the name “Birdwatch,” are slapped onto posts with users offering corrective diagnoses for often dubious claims. Community notes sometimes do the trick, but they’re no replacement for the website actually enforcing rules about purposely spreading disinformation, propaganda, and dangerous conspiracy theories. As such, many longtime users have thus fled from the platform toward alternatives such as Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads, a clone made by Facebook and Instagram parent company Meta. (The analytics firm Similarweb reported that 115,000 people deactivated their X accounts on Election Day alone; meanwhile, Bluesky has surged from 9 million to 26 million users between September and January.)

Meta is a company with a history of mirroring, or perhaps copying, other companies. When Zuckerberg couldn’t buy Snapchat in 2013, Instagram launched its own version of the app’s “Stories” feature to huge success. When Meta’s social media dominance was threatened by TikTok, the company added Reels to Instagram in 2021. And while X mostly sucked attention, rather than advertising dollars, away from Meta, it debuted Threads in 2023, pitching itself as a place to post short-form thoughts away from the sleazy glare of Musk and his edgelord compatriots.

But on Jan. 7, Meta took yet another page from a rival’s playbook, this time announcing it is dismantling its third-party fact-checking program in lieu of an X-style community notes feature. Announcing the change, Zuckerberg said that he wants to recommit to “free expression.” 

Political pressures at play

“Instead of going to some so-called expert, it instead relies on the community and the people on the platform to provide their own commentary to something that they’ve read,” said Kaplan, on Jan. 2 in an exclusive interview with Fox News.

In response to the policy shift, president-elect Donald Trump said Meta has “come a long way,” signaling his pleasure. This comes just months after Trump wrote that Zuckerberg should face life in prison for interfering with the U.S. elections.

Now, with Trump set to assume the office of the presidency once more, it is perhaps unsurprising that Meta wants to cozy up to the Trump Administration and kiss the ring. It’s politically advantageous, especially given that Meta is set to face off with the U.S. Justice Department in an antitrust case in April that could lead to a forced sale of Instagram.

But the net result of the death of content moderation for users is that Meta’s ecosystems are following X’s lead into a state of abject disrepair.

The current state of Facebook is bleak: Scroll through and you’ll find engagement announcements and new babies, but you’ll also find increasingly irrelevant product advertisements, a litany of Reels repurposed from TikTok, lowbrow sports meme pages, and posts in groups which couldn’t be further from your interests. Today, I saw a post in “Downtown Moms – New York City” offering nannying services, despite living in Virginia and having no children.

Then, there’s all of the AI slop. The decision to remove social media guardrails comes as AI-generated content is flooding the internet. Scrolling Facebook, I see a beautiful winter scene from a coffee shop window—or should I say “COFE” shop because the chalkboard in the image, like most AI-generated media, struggles with writing out words. Oh, and there’s a giant horse made out of bread. Researchers at Stanford and Georgetown universities recently found that “spammers and scammers” driven by “profit or clout, not ideology” were using AI-generated images to receive views and interactions in the hundreds of millions on Facebook.

Instagram is, for the moment, much better: I see a friend’s travel account, an ad for a sweatshirt with a highland cow on it (I might buy that), University of Michigan football updates (my wife went there), and tons of dog-related content (I could book that nanny for my dog, actually). Instagram is far from perfect, a long way from the simple photo-sharing app it once was, but it offers a glimpse into what Facebook could be if its owners hadn’t given up and force-fed users garbage.

Facebook is desolate in no small part because the platform stopped showing users much that was newsy and political years ago. Meta began limiting the amount of “civic content” users saw starting in 2021, but now it’s decided it should add some back in.

“We want to undo the mission creep that has made our rules too restrictive and too prone to over-enforcement,” Kaplan writes in the aforementioned statement. “We’re getting rid of a number of restrictions on topics like immigration, gender identity and gender that are the subject of frequent political discourse and debate. It’s not right that things can be said on TV or the floor of Congress, but not on our platforms.”

When Musk took over X, hate speech surged on the platform, including increased usage of the N word, LGBT slurs, and antisemitic vitriol, according to nonprofit watchdogs like the Center for Countering Digital Hate and Anti-Defamation League. In this way, X has not just become unusable but rather very usable for those trying to make the world a worse place for minority groups. Could Facebook and Instagram face the same fate?

The end of Facebook’s third-party fact-checking system is unfortunate, but the system wasn’t so vital to the health and wellness of the platform for a simple reason: most of the content on the site was apolitical. Now that Facebook is bringing back politics, there may be real-world harms to welcoming that discourse back into the arena without. A 2020 Pew Research Center survey found that 41% of American adults, and approximately 70% of LGBTQ Americans, have personally experienced online harassment. And according to Stanford University, online harassment can lead to serious emotional, physical, and/or financial consequences in the real world.

Meta’s CEO is following Musk’s lead in both management and lobbying: He knows that we live in a world where conspiracy and nonsense is more important than the pursuit of truth. Trump, who has repeatedly denied the results of the 2020 election, is headed back to the White House flanked by a leading anti-vaccine advocate in Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. as his Health and Human Services Secretary.

Zuckerberg doesn’t want to get left behind. And he won’t. His users are the ones that will suffer the most when the platform gets uglier.