Totally controversial and contrarian

Jan. 7, Wild Iris Ridge Park

For the record, for what it’s worth, I’m way more okay with crowd-sourced fact-checking on social media platforms than I am with it in the hands of contracted third-party companies, which can totally have built-in biases. The former method is called Community Notes on X, and from my perspective, it works quite well. It’s self-correcting, open-sourced, and powered by the users of the platform. As the Twitter Files made excruciatingly clear, Old Twitter censored like crazy and deplatformed like crazy when posts and posters went against the government’s approved narrative, obviously because, as clearly documented, government agencies were given a backdoor into Old Twitter. I think the crowd-sourced Community Notes-style system is a far far better way of dealing with mis/dis-info without introducing an automatic political bias. That’s just my opinion. Me doing me.

Also, my opinion, I’m sure totally controversal and contrarian: How’s a little disinfo/misinfo going to hurt you? I think we should take some personal responsibility—use our brains and freewill to navigate the data on social media, and we should trust ourselves more than a hired company to decide what “facts” are true and what are not. Lots of “facts” have an automatic bias. “Science” is paid for by somebody, for example. Just because something is published as a scientific fact doesn’t necessarily mean it’s true. We know enough about how vested interests control the direction and release of research—i.e. we know better! (See: Big Pharma.)

So, yeah, I applaud Facebook’s ditching of paid “fact-checkers” and going instead with a crowd-sourced system. I seen a whole bunch o’ pearl-clutching ‘bout that today on FB in my feed. It’s almost like some people need an authority to tell them what to believe. I believe in a more transparent, self-governing system, and that’s what crowd-sourced fact-checking is designed to be.

Perhaps related, perhaps not: Where have all the real anarchists gone? The ones I know have become authoritarians (and still call themselves anarchists).

UPDATE—relevant Glenn Greenwald video regarding Meta's new policy:

https://rumble.com/v66wldd-system-update-show-384.html?start=458