Meta’s moderation policy dismantling will hurt, but it can be good in the long run

Meta’s announcement on Tuesday (7^th) that, among other actions, it will end partnerships with fact-checking agencies in the US, replacing them with “community notes,” and relax restrictions on certain types of content, has alarmed many people.

In a somewhat convoluted way and not without causing damage, this might lead to a good outcome (for us) in the long run.

If we take X (former Twitter) as an example, the relaxation of moderation there accelerated the discarding of Elon Musk’s platform as a habitable place, leading to losses in revenue, users, and relevance in public debate.

It would be great if this were repeated with Instagram, Facebook, and Threads. Even if so, we will have to deal with three inevitable and worrying consequences:

1. Targeted campaigns of hate, harassment, and the occurrence of crimes (as considered outside of the US, such as racism and homophobia in Brazil) are likely to increase. It will be up to the police and the judiciary to increase their attention and be quicker in their actions to mitigate the damage.
2. Fact-checking agencies will suffer a financial blow. Meta is the largest funder of many of them; some were created solely or primarily to act in the company’s program.
3. Mark Zuckerberg’s boot-licking Trump, combined with an explicit threat to the sovereignty of Latin American justice and European legislation by Joel Kaplan, Meta’s vice-president of global affairs, could have serious systemic effects, such as on commercial and diplomatic relations and tariff policies between those countries and the US.

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It would be naive to expect a mass exodus of users from Meta’s platforms in response to the dismantling of moderation, although searches for deleting accounts increased sharply. Less naive would be to witness a more incisive reaction from governments and companies committed to values opposed to those made explicit by Meta’s leadership.

How about abandoning their presence on Instagram and Facebook or, at the very least, stopping injecting money into Meta’s advertising engine? If Meta’s business is to dominate our attention, nothing hurts the company more than ignoring it.

On an individual level, abandoning ship is a more difficult, less obvious decision. I should keep my Instagram account — it’s where loved ones post updates — and I won’t block Threads on the fediverse, although I don’t condemn or criticize those who do/will do so. That crowd of “preventive fediblock” to Threads had some reason.