Meta’s decision to ditch independent fact-checking on its US platforms “couldn’t be more validating” for its own decision to let users police content themselves, the boss of social network X says.
X Corp chief executive Linda Yaccarino made the comments at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on Wednesday, saying the social networks’ approach represented a fresh approach to free speech online.
Her statements come despite studies criticising X Corp’s crowd-sourced fact-checking program Community Notes, which researchers said allowed misinformation to spread without verification.
The X Corp boss appeared at the Venetian Hotel in an interview with former Fox News and CBS journalist Catherine Herridge, and immediately praised Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement to replace its third-party fact-checking program with user moderation.
Meta’s decision to follow the approach taken by X in the US was a public endorsement of the company’s actions, Ms Yaccarino said, and its effectiveness in online moderation.
“It’s really exciting that when you think about Community Notes being good for the world, think about it as this global collective consciousness keeping each other accountable at global scale in real time,” she said.
“It couldn’t be more validating to see that Mark and Meta realise that.”
X’s Community Notes program, in which users add context and facts to posts, was introduced in 2021 but became the main source of content moderation on the social network after Elon Musk purchased the company in late 2022.
The program, formerly known as Birdwatch, lets X users sign up as contributors and add corrections or context to text, photos or video posted to the platform.
Contributors can also vote on the usefulness of notes to determine which should be seen by more users, but the notes are not verified or checked by a third party.
In Meta’s announcement, Mr Zuckerberg referenced X’s use of fact checking by the platform’s own users and said the system could deliver less bias.
“We’ve seen this approach work on X where they empower their community to decide when posts are potentially misleading and need more context,” he said.
But a Center for Countering Digital Hate study that analysed more than one million Community Notes about the recent US election found most accurate notes (74 per cent) were not shown to users, and misleading posts received 13 times as many views as the notes that corrected them.
Despite the findings, Ms Yaccarino told the audience X had become a leading news app in “a couple of hundred” countries and planned to continue sharing revenue with “independent journalists” and podcasters to support a different type of journalism.
The coming year would see X’s owner Mr Musk play a substantial role in the upcoming Trump administration in the US, she said, and the social network would also expand its offerings into payment technology.
While little has been confirmed about X’s move into cryptocurrency, Ms Yaccarino confirmed it would offer payments in the coming year.
“X Money, it’s going to change both payments and the opportunities (for) creators on the platform forever, then you have to talk about profit,” she said.
“Those two things together (will be a) profound differentiation for our company and profoundly propelling us at breakneck speed into ’25.”
X has yet to post a profit under Mr Musk’s ownership and suffered a significant loss of ad revenue following the 2022 takeover.
