As the UK prepares for its General Election on July 4th, Meta has announced a series of measures aimed at combating what it describes in vague and ill-defined ways as “misinformation” and “hate speech” on its platforms.
In a statement, Meta’s UK Director of Public Policy, Rebecca Stimson, said that Meta will continue to remove “the most serious kinds of misinformation from Facebook, Instagram and Threads, such as content that could contribute to imminent violence or physical harm, or that attempts to interfere with voting”.
However, “for content that doesn’t violate these particular policies” – i.e., ‘misinformation’ and ‘hate speech’ – Stimson announced that Meta will be working with “independent fact-checking organisations, all certified by the International Fact Checking Network (IFCN) or the European Fact-Checking Standards Network (EFCSN), who review and rate content”.
In the UK certified organisations include Full Fact, Reuters, Logically Facts and FactCheckNI.
Stimpson goes on to say that when these epistemological paragons have “debunked” all online falsehood fed their way, Meta will attach warning labels to the offending content and reduce its distribution in ‘Feed’ and ‘Explore’ so platform users “are less likely to see it”.
During the UK’s election period, the aim is for Meta to “make it easier for all our fact-checking partners to find and rate content related to the election because we recognise that speed is especially important in these moments”.
According to Stimpson, Meta has also “increased its capacity to rate and review content and is now using keyword detection to group related content in one place, making it easy for fact-checkers to find”. A new research tool, Meta Content Library, which has a powerful search capability will also be made available to its “fact checking partners” and will “support them in their work”.
The presumption in all of this is that ‘fact checkers’ are without political or epistemological biases of their own, and can therefore act as impartial arbiters of what is and what is not ‘misinformation’ and ‘hate speech’.
While this might sound like an attractive idea, at the FSU we know from experience that people engaging in perfectly lawful, but controversial speech can find themselves kicked off social media platforms – or worse – under the guise of protecting various victim groups from “harassment and abuse”.
The problem with the concept of ‘hate speech’ is that it relies so heavily on subjective and unclear terms, leaving fact checking agencies open to allegations of censoring perfectly lawful speech that they happen not to like for ideological reasons. It’s a point that’s borne out by pre-Musk Twitter’s policy of banning people – including comedy writer Graham Linehan, barrister Dennis Kavanagh, journalist Meghan Murphy and philosopher Holly Lawford-Smith – for expressing gender critical beliefs, as well as Meta-owned Instagram’s recent wave of censorship of account users who speak out against gender ideology.
The other difficulty with Meta’s proposal is that there is no single fact-checker that can be trusted to objectively distinguish between ‘information’ and ‘mis-information’.
Take one of Meta’s partner organisations, Full Fact, as an example. Full Fact recently contributed to a guide to ‘conspiracy theories’ (‘the Guide’) for all MPs, prospective MPs and members of the House of Lords. The controversial document was commissioned by the then Leader of the House of Commons, Penny Mordaunt MP and launched in the House of Commons on 9th May.
Curiously, the section of the Guide prepared by Full Fact on the conspiracy theories surrounding Covid-19 avoids any mention of one of the most well-known pandemic-era ‘conspiracy theories’, namely, the lab-leak hypothesis – that SARS-CoV-2 was created in a Chinese lab and then accidentally leaked.
The reason this isn’t mentioned, we suspect, is because it was identified as a conspiracy in 2020 by none other than Full Fact. A Full Fact report from October 2020 titled ‘Conspiracy Beliefs’ says: “The Covid-19 pandemic also brought its own suite of conspiracy theories. The claim that ‘SARS-Cov-2 was made in a lab’ was believed by 30% of respondents in the UK, and almost as many (29%) in the US.”
But of course the lab-leak theory has become more mainstream as time has passed and more evidence has come to light. Last year, for instance, following 18 months of painstaking research and analysis, a US Senate Committee published a 304-page investigation into the matter and concluded: “The preponderance of circumstantial evidence supports an unintentional research-related incident…”
In other words, the difference between ‘mis-information’ and ‘information’ is sometimes little more than the passage of time. This was eloquently expressed by the former Supreme Court judge Lord Sumption in an article for the Spectator:
All statements of fact or opinion are provisional. They reflect the current state of knowledge and experience. But knowledge and experience are not closed or immutable categories. They are inherently liable to change. Once upon a time, the scientific consensus was that the sun moved around the Earth and that blood did not circulate around the body. These propositions were refuted only because orthodoxy was challenged by people once thought to be dangerous heretics.
