Fight against misinformation wanes at social media giants
As companies have recently cut jobs, many teams tasked with fighting false and misleading information have taken a hit.
< p class="css -at9mc1 evys1bk0">SAN FRANCISCO - YouTube, like other social media platforms, spent years expanding its efforts to fight misinformation after the 2016 election. It hired political experts and content moderators and invested in more technology to limit the reach of fake stories. Not anymore.Last month, the Google-owned company quietly trimmed its small team of policy experts tasked with handling misinformation, three people say knowing the decision. The cuts, part of the reduction of 12,000 employees by Google's parent company Alphabet, left just one person in charge of disinformation policy globally, one of the people said.
The cuts reflect an industry trend that threatens to undo many of the safeguards that social media platforms have put in place in recent years to ban or cracking down on misinformation – like false claims about the Covid-19 pandemic, the Russian war in Ukraine, or the integrity of elections around the world. Twitter, under new owner Elon Musk, has reduced its staff, while Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, has shifted its focus and resources to the immersive world of the Metaverse.
In the face of economic headwinds and political and legal pressures, social media giants have shown signs that tackling fake news online is no longer such a high priority, which which has experts following the problem fearing that it is further eroding trust online.
"I wouldn't say the war is over, but I think that we've lost key battles," said Angelo Carusone, president of the liberal media watchdog Media Questions for America. After years of trying, he described a growing sense of struggle fatigue. “I think we as a society have lost the appetite to keep fighting. And that means we're going to lose the war. »
Meta restored the Former President Donald J. Trump's Facebook and Instagram accounts, just two years after he suspended him for inciting violence before the Capitol stormed. He did so even though his posts on his own platform, Truth Social, are full of extremist content, like conspiracy theories propagated by the QAnon movement that Facebook has previously declared unacceptable. (Mr. Trump hasn't posted there yet.)
Mr. Musk also called on Mr. Trump to return to Twitter, one of several steps he has taken to dismantle many of the platform's previous policies, boasting that he wants to reverse censorship decisions made by its former owners. . The team that oversaw trust and safety issues - including misinformation - was among those eliminated under Mr. Mu...
As companies have recently cut jobs, many teams tasked with fighting false and misleading information have taken a hit.
< p class="css -at9mc1 evys1bk0">SAN FRANCISCO - YouTube, like other social media platforms, spent years expanding its efforts to fight misinformation after the 2016 election. It hired political experts and content moderators and invested in more technology to limit the reach of fake stories. Not anymore.Last month, the Google-owned company quietly trimmed its small team of policy experts tasked with handling misinformation, three people say knowing the decision. The cuts, part of the reduction of 12,000 employees by Google's parent company Alphabet, left just one person in charge of disinformation policy globally, one of the people said.
The cuts reflect an industry trend that threatens to undo many of the safeguards that social media platforms have put in place in recent years to ban or cracking down on misinformation – like false claims about the Covid-19 pandemic, the Russian war in Ukraine, or the integrity of elections around the world. Twitter, under new owner Elon Musk, has reduced its staff, while Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, has shifted its focus and resources to the immersive world of the Metaverse.
In the face of economic headwinds and political and legal pressures, social media giants have shown signs that tackling fake news online is no longer such a high priority, which which has experts following the problem fearing that it is further eroding trust online.
"I wouldn't say the war is over, but I think that we've lost key battles," said Angelo Carusone, president of the liberal media watchdog Media Questions for America. After years of trying, he described a growing sense of struggle fatigue. “I think we as a society have lost the appetite to keep fighting. And that means we're going to lose the war. »
Meta restored the Former President Donald J. Trump's Facebook and Instagram accounts, just two years after he suspended him for inciting violence before the Capitol stormed. He did so even though his posts on his own platform, Truth Social, are full of extremist content, like conspiracy theories propagated by the QAnon movement that Facebook has previously declared unacceptable. (Mr. Trump hasn't posted there yet.)
Mr. Musk also called on Mr. Trump to return to Twitter, one of several steps he has taken to dismantle many of the platform's previous policies, boasting that he wants to reverse censorship decisions made by its former owners. . The team that oversaw trust and safety issues - including misinformation - was among those eliminated under Mr. Mu...
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