Mark Zuckerberg appeared on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast and shared that X, formerly known as Twitter, “just did it better than us” when it came to stopping the spread of disinformation, misinformation, and hate speech.
“I think what Twitter and X have done with community notes — I think it’s just a better program,” Zuckerberg said during the episode released on Friday. “Rather than having a small number of fact-checkers, you get the whole community to weigh in when people usually disagree on something, but they tend to agree on how they’re voting on a note. That’s a good sign to the community that there actually is, like a broad consensus on this, and then you show it, and you’re showing more information, not less.”
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Zuckerberg said Meta’s implementation of third-party fact-checkers created a slippery slope.
“I don’t know if it’s something like 1984, one of these books,” Zuckerberg said. “It just got to a point where it’s just OK, this is destroying so much trust, especially in the United States, to have this program.”
Zuckerberg said he started coming to this conclusion a couple of years ago, as he noticed the fact-checkers were politically slanted in their reviews — particularly when it came to what posts and topics they decided on fact-check.
“The point isn’t to, like, judge people’s opinions,” Zuckerberg said. “It’s to provide in this layer, to kind of help fact check some of the stuff that seems the most extreme, but it just, you know, it was, it was just never accepted by people broadly. I think people just felt like the fact-checkers were too biased.”
On Tuesday, Zuckerberg made the announcement to abandon the use of independent fact-checkers and instead opt for X’s “community notes” approach.
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Meta often received criticism from Republicans that the fact-checkers were more favorable to Democrats and their agenda. Fact-checkers did not have the power to remove content. Rather, content was flagged for Meta to review against its community standards.
“We built a lot of complex systems to moderate content, but the problem with complex systems is they make mistakes,” Zuckerberg said. “Even if they accidentally censor just 1% of posts, that’s millions of people, and we’ve reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship.”