Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement that Meta would scrap fact-checking on Facebook and Instagram in the United States marked a strange and unexpected inversion. For the first time in the company’s history there will be fewer checks on content in its home country than in the rest of the world.
For over a decade, as activists and journalists pushed Facebook to control the proliferation of misinformation, disinformation and outright fake news, countries from the “global south” were at the front of the battle. The platform was accused of fuelling violence across Africa, Asia and Latin America that far outpaced any fallout from false or misleading posts in the United States or Europe.
Leaked internal documents showed that in 2020, Facebook teams spent over 3.2m hours moderating content, but 87% of that was…
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Guardian Weekly (Digital) - 1 Issue, 17 January 2025