Meta, which just a decade ago was not only proudly manipulating news feeds of users, cheered on by the left to such an extent that PNAS, the same publication that claimed female-named hurricanes are more dangerous and a common weedkillers turns frogs 'gay', published the results without any concern over the ethics of it.
No more. Both Jeff Bezos of Amazon and Mark Zuckerberg of Meta see that the election in November which some partisans keep denying was a sign that culture had gone too far. Raising 300% more than an opponent and yelling "fascist" and bragging about the stock market was not enough. They met with President-Elect Trump and then Meta did something surprising; they announced they were ending the reign of secret corporate fact-checkers and would go to community notes.
Like the Twitter that social authoritarians began to hate once Republican stopped being banned.
Whether you agree with the politics or not, Meta is smart to do so, just like Twitter was. While it is true that a mob can be dumb panicky animals, it is not better when a secret group controls what facts are allowed. Then you have Wikipedia, where a lawyer for the Democratic party group Sourcewatch can wipe out my existence and hijack the Science 2.0 entry - because they insist pro-science groups must be secretly funded the way they are.
The Wikipedia approach uses this mentality while pretending to be equal. Activists, marketers, and bad actors hiding behind codenames simply use the 'swampland in Florida' approach to boost each other up and then control whatever they want to control.
Corporate fact-checkers hired by third-party companies can have their own goals, and they are not the goals of your company. But people in the know can help.
The wisdom of crowds is a thing. Ask a random mathematician or physicist how many jelly beans are in a jar and it's a bad guess no different than any kid in middle school could make. Take 100 people and average out their guesses and the result is so accurate it's spooky.
Did you guess 659 gumballs or 27,852 beads? The wisdom of crowds can do a better job. Photo: Albert Kao and Andrew Berdahl
Twitter shows it works better than secret cabals turning the knobs of what it truth and accuracy. A study of community notes related to COVID-19 found 96% accuracy and commoners cited high-quality sources 87% of the time. Is that more trustworthy than a British epidemiologist with outsized control of UK health policy running off to see his mistress while he was insisting everyone else stay locked in their apartments? Yes it is. People in Taiwan are a lot better at fact-checking Communist Chinese disinformation than corporate fact-checkers who just Google and if a result near the top of Google agrees, declare the communist propaganda the truth.(1) Crowdsourced fact-checking was far more reliable than journalists, perhaps because group diversity means less ideological bias.
Secret paid fact-checkers banned stories about Hunter Biden's laptop. They banned discussion of the Occam's Razor and completely plausible evidence of a lab leak in Wuhan. Imagine what they would have done to those debunking Dan Rather's fake George Bush document if they had such control back then.(2)
Mr. Zuckerberg was being kind when he said there were "too many mistakes" because what he really meant was when he next said "and too much censorship" and regulatory reality was going to set in when the political party being censored now has both houses of Congress, the White House, and the majority of state Governor's mansions.
It doesn't matter why a business leader does the right thing, only that they do the right thing, and leveraging the wisdom of crowds is better than using secret sauce to create a veil of truth.
Yes, that can also mean Nazis and other progressive anti-Semites won't get banned either, but that's the price of freedom, and community notes can tackle that the same way they do sketchy drop-shippers paying influencers to promote their companies.
Leave censorship to Europe and let America be America.
NOTES:
(1) They may be also paid by China, as we have seen a lot of in American science academia, the same way a lot of American environmental groups are paid by Russia using offshore donor-advised funds.
(2) Instead, they only had corporate media putting up walls against the truth. It's nice that Rather still has a career doing creampuff celebrity interviews where he repeats what they just said, as if it's something really profound.
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