Whether you’re a META stockholder or just a casual Facebook user, get ready to get pumped, because Facebook is making a major change that’s going to make everyone’s lives so much easier: Facebook has announced that instead of flagging all the misinformation, they’re just going to start flagging the actual information.
So much yes! Talk about improving efficiency.
Despite significantly reducing their threshold for what can be considered misinformation after Trump’s reelection in 2024, Facebook still has its hands full with attempting to control the misinformation and blatant propaganda that frequently circulates on its site. From foreign bot farms to AI deepfakes, a tipping point has been reached where the vast majority of posts circulating Facebook are dubious, misleading, and downright harmful. But a simple tweak to their misinformation policy is about to make the lives of Facebook’s fact checkers and users alike so much easier, as Facebook will now operate on the presumption that every post you see is bullshit unless it’s specifically denoted as not being such.
“From now on, if you see something on Facebook, you can just go ahead and assume it’s not information unless we’ve specifically flagged it as such,” explained Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. “This policy change is a win for both Facebook users and our poor, overworked fact checkers. If the video or post you’re seeing in your feed is a real thing that actually happened, it will display a green checkmark denoting that it contains actual information. Posts which contain lies about vaccines that some person just made up, AI videos of brave soldiers cleaning barnacles off of whales, and other nonsense can just be assumed to be dumb crap. If users see a post they feel may contain actual information, they are free to flag the post and our staff of highly trained fact checkers will review the post within 24 days and flag it if it is determined to be information.”
Wow. Seems like this is something they should have done a long time ago.
But there’s more! Another cool feature that Facebook is implementing is the ability to filter the actual information out of your feed, which will be the default setting on all accounts and can be turned off by navigating to Settings>Information>Show Information In My Feed>Yes. This move makes a lot of sense, Facebook!
