Zuckerberg's content moderation pivot and the critical matter of who to trust

Are community notes better than 3rd party fact-checking?

(image: ideogram.ai)

One of the items dominating the news cycle over the past week has been Meta's startling reversal of its long-defended fact-checking content moderation policy, set up in 2016 to police the spread of falsehood and misinformation on the site. The new Meta strategy involves shedding a sprawling fact-checking ecosystem employing 40 000 people in favour of reader-sourced editing suggestions (called ‘community notes’), akin to the approach used by X. Debates about the accuracy of professional fact-checking versus the wisdom of crowds have raged back and forth all week. Much is at stake.

In fact, it could be argued that everything is at stake, including civilization.

Meta’s announcement is just one skirmish in a much larger battle to protect the trust we require in the information we consume. That trust has now frayed significantly. If there are no reliable sources that citizens can trust to relay information with demonstrable veracity, only purgatory awaits. Our decisions and opinions are then up for grabs by bad actors deploying attention-addictive technologies that most of us neither recognize nor understand as such.

I had coffee last week with the ex-editor-in-chief and co-founder of Daily Maverick, Branko Brkic.

So exercised has Brkic become about the sharp collapse of the Fourth Estate globally, that he has formed a global organization, called the Kontinuum Project, to try and save it. The project has a prestige advisory team that includes high-profile influencers like Nobel Laureate Maria Ressa and ex-New Yorker and Vanity Fair editor Tina Brown, as well as the support of media publications in over 100 countries. Their mission is simple - to restore trust in the organizations which produce and control the flow of information and news, particularly those which reach millions of people and more.

This is a long-term project, according to Brkic. It could take ten years, even more. There are no quick fixes. If media literacy, critical thinking and objectivity cannot be instilled in news producers and consumers alike, and if we cannot stem the flow of flotsam that threatens to drown us in rumour, innuendo and blatant propaganda, we have no chance of defending the very basis of civil society - a reliance on the truth of things. Fail, and we will live in a multiverse of endlessly competing alternative facts. The Kontinuum Project intends to move forward along multiple campaign tracks, starting with media literacy evangelism across multiple geographies supported by hundreds of participating media outlets (over 800 to date).

The Meta content moderation skirmish is an indicator of the problem that Brkic is trying to address, so it is worth taking a closer look. Even though Meta is not a news organization per se, studies show that over 50% of people get their news through social media; it is reasonable to demand that the same standards of veracity should apply to both old and new media.

To avoid getting swept away by other Meta matters, let's dispense with the obvious. The timing of the content moderation announcement just prior to Trump's inauguration was simply terrible optics, as was the appointment of Trump pal Dana White to the Meta board, as was Zuck's pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago to break bread with the president-elect, as was his financial contribution to the inauguration celebrations, as was the appointment of ex-Republican lobbyist and Trump confidant, Joel Kaplan, as head of Meta global affairs. The closely clustered timing (deliberate, according insiders) of these events paints a picture of a cowed CEO prostrating himself (along with Amazon chief Bezos and others) in front of a bully, as was so sharply portrayed in the unpublished Washington Post cartoon by Pulitzer Prize winner Ann Telnaes, who quit the newspaper in disgust when the newspaper spiked her astute contribution.

So, for the sake of simplicity, let's just say, yeah, obviously, he is doing what he has to do for the good of his shareholders, and for his own 13% of the company. Let's just block our noses against the odour of tainted ethics. Let's just agree that this is the way capitalism works. Instead, let's look at the meat of the matter - Meta’s pivot from fact-checking to voluntary community notes. Is this a good idea for the rest of us?

Here we should pause to see how far the Fourth Estate has fallen. I am old enough to have lived in the US when Walter Cronkite was anchoring CBS News towards the end of his career. His trust rating among the American public hovered around 70%. Yeah, of course, that had a lot to do with his avuncular demeanour and his calm delivery, but there was something more fundamental going on - the social contract between the public and the news outlets was intact; everyone accepted that facts were to be checked, that objectivity was a goal and not a hindrance, that news stories never relied on single sources or dodgy rumours or unauthenticated documents.

A shining example of the era was Woodward/Bernstein and the Washington Post’s reporting of Watergate, which critically featured the gruff and unshakeable Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee and his team standing at the editorial gate, demanding second sources, verification, authentication and additional evidence before publishing. That was the standard. Make sure you are sure before you publish; there is a sacred trust at stake.

That golden era is over for the most part. The New York Times coverage of Russiagate, the Hunter Biden laptop, and Sweden's Covid journey were nothing short of disgraceful - barely more than opinion driven by ideology and conspiracy theories. The New York Times is not alone, of course. This also applies to the Washington Post and the Guardian and just about every right-wing outlet, from Fox News to the New York Post. News, once a protected, nurtured and revered public service, has largely surrendered to the baser concerns of politics and profit, and truth has taken a back seat.

Which leaves us here, in 2025, with public trust in the mass media cut in half over the last 50 years, hovering now around 35%. Worse still, those who distrust, and they are many, have fled to sources of news lacking any editorial oversight at all - the toxic and undisciplined social media shards of X and TikTok and their ilk.

Here is the sorry state of it, in a picture. More concerning than the trust lost is the dotted line below - 33% have no trust at all in the mass media.

This leads us to the burning question - is the situation going to be improved by shedding institutional oversight and handing the sifting of the truth over to the consumers of news?

My gut feeling is that it is better to appoint good gatekeepers and to trust their authority, as in the grand old days of Ben Bradlee. But alas, at the scale at which this was implemented at Meta, it didn't always pan out, although Zuckerberg’s complaints about fact checkers being ‘too politically biased’ seems knee-jerky and unexamined. On the other hand it is also true that lapses and injustices (like the shutting down of respected scientists with non-heterodox views) and the sidelining of politically unacceptable voices are now well-documented.

Are community notes better? It turns out there is some research that indicates yes, maybe, including this study and this study, which more energetic readers may read if they wish. All of this goes against my intuition, my fear of the irrational mob, and given some of the horrors of history when uninformed crowds got to decide on the truth. On the other hand, given the research to date, I’d like to believe that community notes may offer some hope, depending on their implementation. We have to assume that Meta has spent time doing a whole lot of research before making the decision.

It will be some time before we know whether Meta's new approach helps to re-instill trust in the information we consume on their platforms. Which brings us back to Brkic's Kontinuum Project as it searches for ways to counter the information chaos into which we seem to be heading. If Meta's new content-moderation regime is better than the old one, then it is, at the very least, more fuel for Project Kontinuum's tank.

Steven Boykey Sidley is a professor of practice at JBS, University of Johannesburg and a partner at Bridge Capital. His new book It’s Mine: How the Crypto Industry is Redefining Ownership is published by Maverick451 in SA and Legend Times Group in UK/EU, available now

Steven Boykey Sidley is a professor of practice at JBS, University of Johannesburg and a partner at Bridge Capital. His new book It’s Mine: How the Crypto Industry is Redefining Ownership is published by Maverick451 in SA and Legend Times Group in UK/EU, available now. Copy edited by Bryony Mortimer