Will free speech finally return to Meta?

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META ENDS FACT-CHECKING

Social media giant Meta has announced it will implement an Elon Musk-inspired community notes section on its platforms Facebook, Instagram and Threads, replacing existing ‘fact-checkers’.

The end of its fact-checking partnership will begin in the United States, with the possibility of it being extended to other countries after the company examines regulatory requirements.

Rather than pay independent fact-checkers to flag and debunk misleading posts, Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg said the company would introduce a similar model already being used by rival platform X.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Mark Zuckerberg (@zuck)

Community Notes, formerly BirdWatch before it was re-branded, is a feature on X that relies on crowdsourcing to flag potentially misleading content, becoming widespread in 2023.

Musk has praised the program and applauded Zuckerberg after the announcement.

This is cool pic.twitter.com/kUkrvu6YKY

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 7, 2025

Many have also praised the Meta CEO for his shift back towards free speech, which he says was always the intention of the company when it began (but was it really? more on that soon).

TOTT News has been subjected to the fact-checking infrastructure of Facebook, with our reach being significantly targeted since the ‘pandemic’ era. So it would be a nice change to see.

However, there is a very fine line here between who was actually responsible for the censorship side of things.

One headline that struck my attention was a response by the fact-checkers themselves, who say they had no role in deciding what the company did with the content that was fact-checked.

Now, although this seems like a ridiculous headline, they may actually be correct in this instance.

For you see, despite Zuckerberg acting like he was the victim of pressures from the political establishment and cultural tides, when it came to who made the final call on censorship, it was actually Meta themselves.

Meta ultimately decided how to respond to the fact-checks, adding warning labels, limiting the reach of some content or even removing the posts.

The Meta CEO said last year that the White House pressured his company to censor these posts.

In any instance, it was never the ‘fact-checkers’ themselves that enforced censorship, rather reported to Meta ‘misinformation’ for them to take action (as they were paid to do).

So, who do you trust? Zuckerberg or the government?

We know that our very own government departments were involved in social media censorship here in Australia, as revealed by the military-censorship-complex unveiling.

Thought Police: Australia’s censorship-industrial-complex finally detailed

It is also our government who was pushing the (now failed) ‘misinformation bill’ just a month ago.

This definitely does give consideration to the notion that Meta may have been pressured into acting this way.

However, when we consider the past history of Facebook, including how it was started, as well as Zuckerberg’s previous flip-flopping on censorship issues, I won’t hold my breath to see things pick up instantly.

Meta and the government are much one-in-the-same, and the platform was always designed as an intelligence tool.

THE FACEBOOK WEB

Trying to pin down just who was responsible for the censorship between the intelligence industry and Facebook, beyond the fact-checkers, is like asking the ‘chicken and the egg’ question.

Facebook’s origin story has been told again and again  — but in certain corners of the internet, there is a different take on how it all started. A story that intertwines Zuckerberg and DARPA as the same entity.

On February 4, 2004, DARPA shut down a project called LifeLog. 

It was the very same day that a skinny college student named Mark Zuckerberg officially launched a new website called The Facebook.

You can read just how Facebook may be the continuation of this project at the following link.

So, it is an impossible task to take Zuckerberg on face value, given this shady past of the company.

Furthermore, if the decision is now being made by this same entity to return to an open discussion platform, we must ask ourself: What could be the reason they are reverting now?

One answer is that Facebook is struggling to keep users on the platform as millions flee elsewhere.

This could be the case.

But could it be they are doing this because they want to now gather more data on the public?

Over 50% of Australians still remain unaware about how much data the platform is collecting on them each time they log on or browse, and Meta is notorious for ‘mishandling’ such things.

Australians are still unaware of how much data Facebook is collecting

In 2017, Facebook was fined $168 million by the European Commission for “misleading” users about how data is shared between Facebook and WhatsApp.

Facebook’s most transparency report also reveals it received 30,000 requests from police for data per year, with a 81% compliance rate, up 2.3% from the same time period in 2014.

Meta, instead of acting as modern day Thought Police, will now transition to the biometric ID middle man.

Australia’s controversial ‘age verification’ laws have recently passed into law, with trials underway to determine the ‘correct method’ to enforce the social media age ban.

Who is running the trials for Australia’s social media laws?

For this to work, you would need as many people on the platform as possible, wouldn’t they hope?

Perhaps this is the reason they are easing up on ‘misinformation’. So that users are drawn back in, speech is allowed to flow openly, while each user — both their biometrics and beliefs — are tracked and traced.

It’s just a thought to consider.

Remember that in 2019, Facebook acquired the company Confirm.io, in a move that raised concerns for the future of accessibility to the social media website.

The startup offered an API that let other companies quickly verify if someone’s government-issued identification card, like a driver’s license, was authentic.

The Australian government, long before the social media ban laws were thought of, began floating the idea of age verification because of the lead taken by Facebook at the time.

Government considers forcing Australians to provide ID to use social media

This was before they blanketed the move under the guise of ‘protecting children’, of course.

So, don’t be fooled by the current moves by Meta, as there is always something bigger at play here.

I often wonder about what type of AI systems are analysing all the ‘free speech’ taking place on Twitter and what kind of social profiles they are building for the next major event to occur.

We shall have to wait to see how the future of Meta, and the world, continues to unfold.

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