Wildfires are raging out of control across parts of Los Angeles. A fierce windstorm is fanning embers, billowing dangerous smoke across the city and turning the sky an apocalyptic red.
At least four blazes are spreading in Southern California, near the scenic coast, in Malibu and the Pacific Palisades, as well as further inland. Firefighters are struggling to work in the wind, and the fires are uncontained.
At least 30,000 people have fled. Some abandoned their cars and escaped on foot to avoid roads jammed with traffic. Residents of one nursing home evacuated on gurneys, officials said. Homes, landmarks and places of worship have been destroyed, and officials warned more destruction is coming.
Truth social
Policing the truth on social media is a Sisyphean challenge. The volume of content — billions of posts in hundreds of languages — makes it impossible for the platforms to identify all the errors or lies that people post, let alone to remove them.
Yesterday, Meta — the owner of Facebook, Instagram and Threads — effectively stopped trying. The company said independent fact-checkers would no longer police content on its sites. The announcement punctuated an industrywide retreat in the fight against falsehoods that poison public discourse online.
Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, said the new policy would mean fewer instances when the platforms “accidentally” take down posts wrongly flagged as false. The trade-off, he acknowledged, is that more “bad stuff” will pollute the content we scroll through.
That’s not just an annoyance when you open Facebook on your phone. It also corrodes our civic life. Social media apps — where the average American spends more than two hours per day — are making it so that truth, especially in politics, is simply a matter of toxic and inconclusive debate online.
Meta’s conundrum
It easy to see why Meta made the change. With Donald Trump about to begin his second term, Zuckerberg seems to have decided that alienating half the country is bad business.
Only four years ago, Facebook suspended Trump’s account after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, though Zuckerberg had misgivings at the time about deplatforming a sitting president.
Since then, Republicans in Congress and in the courts have cast decisions by social media platforms to remove posts as an extension of government censorship. Officials in Washington had urged the companies to remove some posts about election fraud and Covid vaccines. The Supreme Court took up a case about Facebook’s removals last year but dismissed it on technical grounds.
Even so, the debate has clearly worried Zuckerberg. In August he wrote a mea culpa to the Republican congressman spearheading the charge against the platforms. He said Meta should have spoken out against what he called “government pressure” to remove some content.
Yesterday, the company went further to court the G.O.P. Meta’s new policy chief, a former Republican operative, told Fox News that there was “too much political bias” in the fact-checking program. Zuckerberg even plans to move the trust and safety teams — those responsible for policing all kinds of content — from California to Texas to “remove the concern that biased employees are overly censoring content.” The company appointed Dana White, a close Trump ally, to its board.
The new town square
Meta is not entirely abdicating responsibility for what appears on its platforms. It will still take down posts with illegal activity, hate speech and pornography, for example.
But like other platforms, it is leaving the political space in order to maintain market share. Elon Musk purchased Twitter (which is now called X) with a promise of unfettered free speech. He also invited back users banned for bad behavior. And he replaced content moderation teams with crowdsourced “community notes” below disputed content. YouTube made a similar change last year. Now Meta is adopting the model, too.
Numerous studies have shown the proliferation of hateful, tendentious content on X. Antisemitic, racist and misogynistic posts there rose sharply after Musk’s takeover, as did disinformation about climate change. Users spent more time liking and reposting items from authoritarian governments and terrorist groups, including the Islamic State and Hamas. Musk himself regularly peddles conspiratorial ideas about political issues like migration and gender to his 211 million followers.
Letting users weigh in on the validity of a post — say, one claiming that vaccines cause autism or that nobody was hurt in the Jan. 6 attack — has promise, researchers say. Today, when enough people speak up on X, a note appears below the contested material. But that process takes time and is susceptible to manipulation. By then, the lie may have gone viral, and the damage is done.
Perhaps people still crave something more reliable. That is the promise of upstarts like Bluesky. What happened at X could be a warning. Users and, more important, advertisers have fled.
It’s also possible that people value entertainment and views they agree with over strict adherence to the truth. If so, the internet may be a place where it is even harder to separate fact from fiction.
For more: Zuckerberg, fed up with criticism, has stepped away from his apologetic approach to problems on his platforms. Read about Zuckerberg’s political transformation.
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