As the United States braces for the arrival of incoming President Donald Trump, tech executives have been bending over backwards in a bid to fight for the influence that billionaire tech bro Elon Musk has been seen wielding over the precocious 78-year-old leader of the superpower nation.
As Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos has pledged a million dollars to the Trump inauguration festivities, Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, the owner of Facebook, announced that they will end the use of fact checking organizations and switch to a system of community notes, similar to those used by Musk’s X (formerly Twitter).
Note that Trump was banned from Facebook and Twitter after he used those platforms to encourage his supporters to attempt a coup and attack the US Capitol, in a bid to stop his rival Joe Biden from being proclaimed president because he lost that election.
Now that he has completed his comeback, the social media landscape has changed significantly. Twitter has been bought by Musk, who not only changed its name, but also removed most of its protections against disinformation and hate speech, including Trump’s reinstatement, along with other controversial users that had also been suspended from the platform.
With Facebook stepping away from fact checking, the transformation is complete and it would seem that we have reached the renaissance of disinformation and misinformation, if we can consider the first terms of Trump, our Rodrigo Duterte and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro as its golden age.
Or, if you come to think of it, that was just the beginning and maybe we are not even in the renaissance and are actually just approaching the golden age of disinformation.
The billionaire tech bro club have now totally abdicated their responsibilities by openly shunning fact checking and turning to the crowd sourced “community notes,” a system that relies on enough volunteers to flag dubious content after it has been released into the wild and has already poisoned vulnerable minds. This system is not only slow to react to mis/disinformation because it relies on volunteers to take action, it can also be countered if the source of the bad info is backed by troll armies who not only circulate the content, but can also overwhelm any attempt to flag their trash “news” as dubious.
These billionaires don’t need even more billions at this point, and yet they are still willing to kiss the wrinkled ass of a petulant man-child-felon in order to protect their selfish interests and make even more money.
That development in the US is worrying because the rest of the Zuck’s Meta kingdom will most likely follow suit, so we should prepare for the demise of any form of organized fact checking in FB. Personally, I don’t use FB or Twitter anymore, but since a lot of people still do, and a lot of those that do are they type that are vulnerable and gullible, we really need to do something about this, at least for the youth, because the old people/dogs who can’t be taught new tricks, are probably a lost cause by now.
If there is any hope, maybe we can take a page from the Finland playbook, where they are teaching media literacy at a young age.
According to a news report on Channel News Asia, schools in Finland are teaching children media literacy, which covers topics like questioning where stories come from, to the right to freedom of expression. The country has been topping the Media Literacy Index every year since the ranking system was first published in 2017. It is an index that compares 47 countries on factors such as education, media freedom, and the ability to resist disinformation.
Their need for media literacy stems from being a neighbor of disinformation hub Russia, along with the need to educate the next generation in an evolving and increasingly complex media landscape, where bad actors peddle potential dangerous misinformation and rhetoric online, along with the rise of artificial intelligence.
Schools across Finland are given the latest book, “The ABC Book of Media Literacy,” to teach the subject. Funding for the book comes from News Media Finland, which believes that a well-educated readership helps the wider media landscape amid shrinking audiences and declining revenue.
Public trust in newspapers in Finland is among the highest in the world, where there are more than 200 different newspapers available across the country with a population of just over 5.5 million.
Given the fact that the people who own and run social media platforms now think that fact checking is bad for their business, it is now our duty to be more critical of all the content we encounter there. Although some of us are less gullible and more media-savvy, we have to admit that the majority of social media users are still highly vulnerable to mis/disinformation that could be used to shape opinions and worldviews, win elections, or push agendas.
If our country cannot make media literacy a priority like it is in Finland, we may have to do the hard work ourselves, by regularly checking with family members who could be exposed to mis/disinformation and making sure they don’t believe everything they see and hear on social media, hook, line, and sinker.*
