Meta’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, announced on Tuesday 7 a series of changes to the content moderation actions on his platforms Facebook, Instagram and Threads, eliminating fact-checkers, slowing down the processes of taking down potentially damaging content from the social fabric and reducing/reallocating his own moderation teams - all in the name of “freedom of expression”.
Despite the noble tone, many who studies the very current phenomena of threats to the integrity and ethics of information, social datification, the platformisation of the economy, surveillance capitalism and data colonialism were appalled.
Zuckerberg didn’t just list measures to loosen content controls on his networks. As with Elon Musk’s X platform, the entrepreneur announced the adoption, instead of checking, of so-called “community notes”, a feature that allows network users to make assessments and add points of view - opinions based or not on evidence - about content in disinformative terms.
