Meta logo is seen in this illustration taken August 22, 2022. Photo: Reuters

Jewish groups and a slew of other organizations said this week they are extremely worried about how Meta’s new community-driven, fact-checking system will worsen online antisemitism, hate speech, and disinformation, and increase the targeting of Jewish communities and individuals.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on Tuesday that starting in the United States, the social media giant is ending its third-party fact-checking program and replacing it with a Community Notes model, like the one on Wikipedia and Elon Musk’s X. Zuckerberg said Meta —which owns Facebook, Instagram, and Threads — made the move in an effort to enhance free expression on its platforms.

“We will allow more speech by lifting restrictions on some topics that are part of mainstream discourse and focusing our enforcement on illegal and high-severity violations” Meta announced. “We’ve seen this approach work on X — where they empower their community to decide when posts are potentially misleading and need more context, and people across a diverse range of perspectives decide what sort of context is helpful for other users to see. We think this could be a better way of achieving our original intention of providing people with information about what they’re seeing — and one that’s less prone to bias.”

Meta added that besides “high-severity violations” — such as  terrorism, child sexual exploitation, drugs, fraud, and scams — it will not take action to enforce its policies unless someone reports an issue, to avoid “too much content being censored that shouldn’t have been.” Meta will also be “getting rid of a number of restrictions on topics like immigration, gender identity, and gender.”

Hate speech and antisemitism will no longer be automatically flagged by Meta, and the company will not proactively remove such content unless a user reports the issue. However, even after receiving a report, there is no guarantee that Meta will delete the harmful content or that the report will be reviewed.

Yfat Barak-Cheney, executive director of the World Jewish Congress Technology and Human Rights Institute (TecHRI), said Meta’s new community notes system for fact-checking “must be approached with great caution.”

“Platforms like X and Wikipedia, which employ similar user-driven concepts, have demonstrated how easily misinformation and disinformation can be manipulated, and putting the onus on the vulnerable communities to report and correct information online,” she noted in a statement. “In an online environment already marked by hostility, we are deeply concerned that the reduction of protections and clear guidelines will open the floodgates to content that fuels real-world threats, including violent acts targeting Jewish communities and individuals.”

“Meta has made important strides in recent years to make its platforms safer, and it is critical that this work continues,” she added. “Rolling back these efforts risks undoing hard-won progress at a time when vigilance against online hate and antisemitism is needed more than ever.”

“It is mind blowing how one of the most profitable companies in the world, operating with such sophisticated technology, is taking significant steps back in terms of addressing antisemitism, hate, misinformation, and protecting vulnerable & marginalized groups online,” said ADL CEO and National Director Jonathan Greenblatt. “The only winner here is Meta’s bottom line and as a result, all of society will suffer.”

“Meta must significantly reform their average user reporting process unless they intend to completely abdicate their responsibility to address antisemitism and hate at a time when it is surging online and offline,” the ADL Center for Technology and Society added. “If all of this is the direction Meta is heading in 2025, it is a bad sign of what is to come for Jews and all marginalized people on their platforms.”

Others outside of the Jewish community also expressed concern about the changes that Zuckerberg announced on Tuesday.

Cyberwell, a nonprofit organization that tackles online antisemitism, said in a released statement on X that the new Meta Community Notes system is “a systematic lowering of the bar on how Meta intends to enforce their Community Standards against hate speech and harassment online.” It also criticized Meta for now giving itself “less accountability” for hate speech that can now spread easier on its platforms. It said the move will result in “more hate speech, more politicized content, more silos, and less effective responses from the platforms.”

“Given the mounting evidence of how hate speech, incendiary content, and harassment lead to real-world harm including hate crimes, terror attacks, and child suicide, CyberWell is deeply concerned at the purposeful deterioration of Trust & Safety best practices at Meta,” the organization said. “For the Jewish community this announcement means that Meta is making it easier for antisemitism to flourish online. It will likely lead to an uptick in hate-posting, harassment, and even a migration of white supremacists and extreme racists onto Meta’s platforms, much like the period immediately following the Twitter acquisition.”

“This is not a victory for free speech — it’s an exchange of human bias in a small, contained group of fact-checkers for human bias at scale through Community Notes,” CyberWell added. “The only way to prevent censorship and data manipulation by any government or corporation would be to institute legal requirements and reforms on Big Tech that enforce social media reform and transparency requirements.”

“The new era for Meta is one in which it has decided to let liars, snake oil salesman, fraudsters, hate actors, propagandists for autocrats like Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and Ayatollah Khamenei unleash a tidal wide of disinformation many times the size of anything we’ve seen to date,” he added. “This is going to increase the spread and visibility of unchallenged lies, it’s going to worsen the spread of hate. It’s going to create more risk to our communities, our democracy, public health, and to our kids.”

Rose Burley, co-founder and executive director of the nonprofit organization the Center for Information Resilience, said the change will “undoubtedly” result in much more disinformation spreading on Meta’s platforms. “Meta, by doing this, are retreating from fact, they are retreating from truth,” he argued. “And by switching to a Community Notes model, they are effectively trying to capture a tidal wave in a bucket, and it’s not going to work … By getting rid of the fact-checkers, what you’re doing is taking away a safeguarding and you’re sending a message to users and to the wider community that truth and facts just don’t really matter anymore.”

The post Jewish, Anti-Hate Groups Express Concern Over Meta’s New Fact-Checking Policy: ‘All of Society Will Suffer’ first appeared on Algemeiner.com.