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"The online newspaper Nu.nl had been Facebook's only factchecking partner in the Netherlands since Leiden University dropped out of the programme last year. The website had sole responsibility for marking Facebook and Instagram news content for Dutch users as being false or misleading, in order to help power the social network's tools that suppress distribution of misinformation."

"A "massive anti-vaccination campaign" has been cited by the European Commission as a reason for social media platforms to intensify their factchecking and revise the internal algorithms that can amplify disinformation. Under a revised code of practice proposed by Brussels, companies such as Facebook, Google and Twitter would need to show why particular material is disseminated and prove that false information is being blocked."

"It has led to a proliferation of fake news and clickbait. It has fuelled surveillance capitalism and normalised pervasive tracking and data-mining. If we want to do something about the proliferation of misinformation and erosion of trust in traditional institutions, it is not enough to regulate or factcheck political adverts. We need to crack down on the use of personal information for all targeted advertising. Otherwise democracy will continue to erode, one highly optimised click at a time."

"But those same services have also enabled the creation of what one professional factchecker calls a "perfect storm for misinformation". And with real-life interaction suppressed to counter the spread of the virus, it's easier than ever for people to fall deep down a rabbit hole of deception, where the endpoint may not simply be a decline in vaccination rates or the election of an unpleasant president, but the end of consensus reality as we know it. What happens when your basic understanding of the world is no longer the same as your neighbour's? And can Facebook stop that fate coming to us all?"

"It has been formed as a reaction to attempts by major tech platforms to clamp down on coronavirus disinformation - but the same tech outlets also help enable its reach: the Light's distribution relies on a 5,000-strong private Facebook group where volunteers offer to hand out copies and post them through their neighbours' doors."

"The promise of Community Notes lies in its transparency and its ability to crowdsource moderation from across ideological divides. By emphasizing consensus, the system avoids the mistrust or perception of bias with platform-driven fact-checking or content removal. Last year YouTube adopted this approach, but as a complement to other products such as information panels, or their recent disclosure requirement when content is altered or synthetic."

"Zuckerberg has said that the platform, which has more than 3 billion people worldwide logging on to its apps every day, will be adopting an Elon Musk-style community notes format for policing what is and isn't acceptable speech on its platforms. Starting in the US, the company will be dramatically shifting the Overton window towards whoever can shout the loudest. The Meta CEO all but admitted that the move was politically motivated. "It's time to get back to our roots around free expression," he said, confessing that "restrictions on topics like immigration and gender […] are out of touch with mainstream discourse". He admitted to past "censorship mistakes" - here, probably meaning the past four years of tamping down political speech while a Democratic president was in office - and said he would "work with President Trump to push back against foreign governments going after American companies to censor more"."

"There is also a lot of research that both third-party fact-checking and Community Notes can be really effective at reducing misperceptions. But - and this is a significant caveat - neither works well as a complete solution for lies on social media. When Twitter was working on Birdwatch, they claimed it would "not replace other labels and fact checks Twitter currently uses". But as I've written about before, Musk scaled back Twitter's Trust and Safety team significantly and positioned Community Notes as the replacement. As Yoel Roth, Twitter's former head of Trust and Safety, told WIRED, "The intention of Birdwatch was always to be a complement to, rather than a replacement for, Twitter's other misinformation methods." In fact, research on various attempts to mitigate COVID misinformation found that a layered, "Swiss cheese" approach might work best, where some efforts work well sometimes, but collectively the system catches most falsehoods."

" Meta apologises over flood of gore, violence and dead bodies on Instagram Users of Reels report feeds dominated by violent and graphic footage after apparent algorithm malfunction Dan Milmo Global technology editor Fri 28 Feb 2025 15.01 GMT Share Mark Zuckerberg's Meta has apologised after Instagram users were subjected to a flood of violence, gore, animal abuse and dead bodies on their Reels feeds. Users reported the footage after an apparent malfunction in Instagram's algorithm, which curates what people see on the app. Reels is a feature on the social media platform that allows users to share short videos, similar to TikTok."