Meta’s New Approach is the Best Attack on Misinformation

Meta’s decision to roll back its Big Brother approach to censoring speech will help the battle against misinformation far more than its more Orwellian efforts ever could. Counterintuitively as it may seem, this is the way to cultivate a culture of truth.

Former Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis was prescient in his 1927 statement about speech and his axiom is as true today as ever. “If there be time to expose through discussion, the falsehoods and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.”

The site formerly known as Twitter has plenty of flaws, but its move to focus on “Community Notes” in place of direct censorship has not been one of them. To Brandeis’s point, many objectionable things are posted there, but those that gain traction inevitably get slapped with one of those notes explaining why the post is misguided or objectively false, complete with documentation any user can read and learn from.

This is far more convincing than prohibiting the original words from being spoken. “More speech” allows the original poster to be shown as foolish or misguided. Censoring removes the original folly, making the author of the nonsense look smarter for having his or her error erased.

Name me one example of direct government or, as here, government “encouraged” censorship that worked out well. I’ll wait. Set aside any present efforts we have not yet seen the long-term fruit of and wartime initiatives to protect sensitive troop information, and I’ll die waiting.

As we have seen vividly with complete falsehoods that have been passed around in recent years only to be taken down by Big Tech censors, people will keep reposting them. There are too many users on these platforms to completely halt that. Meanwhile, removal authenticates the very lies censorship aimed to “protect” us from, particularly when those falsehoods claim conspiracies afoot.

What, after all, is more noble than the little guy attempting to stand up to Big Brother and repeatedly being squashed?

Amidst the whack-a-mole-styled censoring of information they may have first discounted as completely false, a nagging doubt reflexively will arise. “Maybe that is the truth.” Experience — and history in which the censors are on the side of book burnings and dictatorships — fuels that impulse.

We know authoritarian governments have always denied the truth and sought to obscure it. Even our own government has suffered a black eye over the last few years, fighting to strong-arm platforms against information that it later reversed course on and admitted was likely true or at least up for debate.

By removing the statements in question, rather than countering them, neither the original poster nor the audience are given any help fighting their whispers of doubt. Most of the time, the whisper is wrong. Most of the time, the conspiracies and crazy “fake news” are just that. But silence does not fortify against falsity with the force good information does.

The only reason to remove bad information, rather than counter it, is if we doubt the strength of our “good information.” Can our counter withstand the unforgiving light of critique?

X deserves credit for pioneering the new, less heavy-handed approach toward misinformation. Meta and its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, deserve credit for recognizing a competitor’s wisdom and following suit, with Zuckerberg going so far as to acknowledge explicitly Meta adopting X’s approach in his presentation.

Crowdsourced community notes may need to be scaled up from X’s current level, but they are an open invitation to anyone who genuinely believes in the nobility of truth. The notes are written by the community, as the name implies, with the labeling of posts, the publication of the notes and the continued presence of those notes all requiring “upvoting” from the user base.

There are no czars empowered to quash their foes’ ideas while overlooking their allies’ worst lies. X’s community has fact-checked everyone on X, even X owner Elon Musk himself. Not even deceptive advertisers’ ads are off limits, providing a level of safety on advertising that any astute user of Meta’s platforms will have noticed is missing there.

The true quality of the community notes program lies in its reliance on citing sources. So much bad material gets perpetuated using few, if any quality sources. X’s notes insist on the use of good sourcing and users who read the notes can rate them for their clarity and caliber of documentation.

No system is flawless, but if the goal is a fair, unbiased method to counter falsehoods with the truth on a massive scale, this, not overt censorship, is the ticket so long as the community of users is ideologically diverse enough to provide good notes. We affirm human dignity by believing our peers are people worthy of persuasion rather than treating them as infants requiring protection from themselves.

Ironically, Meta’s Threads will now look more like X, the network it has sought to replace. Threads became the fastest-growing social network of all time in no small part due to an influx of ex-X users angry over X’s steps away from censorship.

Will Threads and Meta’s other platforms experience an exodus of users to the more ideologically left-leaning Bluesky? Probably. Will Threads experience a boost from conservatives who now decide it is a good place to gather? Perhaps, though tempered by Elon Musk’s present stardom within the conservative sphere.

This will likely showcase our worst inclinations to seek ideological silos. Those I hear raging over Zuckerberg’s announcement are upset because they’ve grown comfortable with the company enforcing what amounts to their ideological perspective.

Like everyone, Meta’s newfound enemies don’t think of their viewpoint as a perspective. Other folks have biased perspectives, this is about protecting the truth, they claim. I hope those saying such things can pause and hear the dramatic irony of their own words. Their opponents would claim the very same thing, after all.

With fact-checking approaches, boycotts and flamewars, we reliably show we want our viewpoints affirmed. Having the truth challenge us is inconvenient. Community notes give us the opportunity to rise above this intellectual funk. They encourage genuine exploration of truth, since ideas are allowed to challenge us in a setting with proper accountability.

The greatest risk to this new crowdsource fact-checking era in social media is if we do separate ourselves into complete ideological silos. As I alluded to above, quality community notes depend on differing opinions amongst a user base. Those who fear the community notes approach will fulfill their worst fears if they voluntarily self-sort into ideologically validating conclaves, rather than participating in the discourse of ideas.

Meta’s move is an invitation for us to lean into truth and against the worst of human nature. That’s a sentence I did not anticipate writing about a company built upon exploiting our ugliest flaws through its algorithms. But, 2025 is shaping up to be a weird year.

Welcome to a most interesting crossroads for information.