By Rosa Miriam Elizalde on January 16, 2025
Cybertrash without control and without borders. The Meta conglomerate, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Threads, has announced that it will end its data verification program, which had been in place since 2016. Its founder and chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, opportunistically accommodates the Trump era and his Machiavellian advisor Elon Musk, the owner of X and troll of the free flow of misinformation.
What this decision tells us is that openly manipulated or false content will not be removed, and those in charge of verifying the data will all be out on their asses. It also brings back the era of “anything goes”. As noted by The Intercept this week (https://acortar.link/ OKWcJV), which gained access to training materials for Meta employees to adapt to the new rules, examples of expressions allowed on Facebook and Instagram include: “Immigrants are filthy, disgusting pieces of shit”, “Gays are freaks”, among other such pearls.
In an ecosystem where misinformation has enormous influence, the decision that leaves the verification of truthfulness and civility standards up to Internet users will simply amplify the decibels of the most intense, usually affiliated with the far-right and conspiracy theories that were already privileged by the algorithm, but at least until now there was a place where users could turn to demand that expressions of racism and violence be investigated or penalized.
The verification system gave the company a veneer of credibility for a time, although it did not solve the underlying problem and the sifting seemed to always benefit the far-right hordes more than those who confronted them. The backbone of Meta is its advertising system completely outside the law, in which segmentations are possible that would never be allowed outside the conglomerate, and in which, moreover, predominate the actors who continually resort to Facebook to create disinformation campaigns of all kinds.
They may be Cambridge Analytica, intelligence agencies, the oil industry, anti vaccine or simply advertisers trying to define their objectives in a way that the legislation does not allow, but the reality is that the platform has been and continues to be a true global disinformation machine at the service of the highest bidder.
With the goodbye to verifiers what is coming, or will be reinforced, is an uncontrolled and unstoppable avalanche of garbage. Meta has some 3 billion users worldwide, versus some 250 million X, who will weigh the individual right to say and propagate anything over collective rights, and to belittle social values and trample on privacy.
It’s almost forgotten by now that neither Facebook nor X came to data verification programs – now in the past – by chance. Facebook inaugurated it in 2016 in response to growing scrutiny over the platform’s role in spreading disinformation and fake news, particularly after the U.S. presidential election that year, when it was found that the platform could be used as a perfect tool for tele-targeted campaigns and unrestricted content sharing and organizing groups of people around some stance, ideology or idea, not necessarily democratic or respectful.
The pressure then was not only political, but from the scientific community. Several studies showed, including one published by the journal Science, in 2018 (https://acortar. link/oimltd), that fake posts on social networks spread up to 20 times faster than real ones, especially if the posts are anti-government conspiracy theories, racist insults and calls for violence. That’s 2,000 percent more interaction and 2,000 percent more ad revenue, according to Science. And the more “attention-grabbing” a publication is (often, the further it is from reality), the better.
To the above must be added a nuance provided by several authorities in Brazil, among them the Secretary of Digital Policies, João Brant. The announcement made by Mark Zuckerberg last week anticipates what kind of alliances Meta will have with the U.S. government to confront the European Union, Brazil and other countries that have promoted policies and legislation to protect rights in the online environment . Brant proposes, in particular, to expand international efforts at the UN, Unesco, G-20, BRICS and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to strengthen the information integrity agenda.
Many agree with Brazil. The transnational power of companies like Elon Musk’s and Mark Zuckerberg’s can only be opposed by a system of international alliances that, in parallel, can face up to and install a cordon sanitaire to cybertrash. Perhaps Meta’s new decision will help to make practical global decisions before the landfill buries us all.
Source: La Jornada, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English