Hold Facebook accountable for scams, hoaxes
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Hold Facebook accountable for scams, hoaxes

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Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg's decision to fire his fact-checking team has opened the floodgates to a deluge of scams, hate speech, propaganda and lies. I first discovered how the platform used by 3.2 billion people was being misused when I started sub-editing at the Post in 2017. Every news story about the plight of the Rohingya was followed -- in seconds -- by dozens of crude memes and copy-and-paste hate speech in comments demonising the stateless people as usurpers, animals and even cannibals. The campaign was later linked to propaganda farms run by Myanmar's Tatmadaw military.

Instead of using trained fact-checkers, Facebook will use the kind of "user-generated community notes" introduced by Elon Musk after he bought Twitter. The veracity of a post will be determined by ordinary people, as opposed to trained experts. But as the saying goes, truth is not determined by a majority vote. If you have a medical problem, do you poll your friends or do you ask your doctor? The idea that all opinions are equal is absurd; in this highly-specialised world, we each have our area of expertise.

Partly as the result of a sustained disinformation campaign, many people no longer trust experts. But the answer to that is to get better experts, not to abandon the whole idea of expertise. If facts have been misreported, the answer is to find the true facts, not to trust somebody's ill-informed opinion that happens to coincide with your own.

The majority of people who voted for Donald Trump believed that immigration and violent crime were at an all-time high -- things that were simply not true, but were repeated so often on right-wing and social media that many believed them -- along with the fiction that immigrants were eating people's pets.

As the modern world's primary source of news and information, social media does have a responsibility to tell the truth. Misinformation is dangerous. The Nazi vilification of Jews eventually led to many Germans believing they were the cause of most of Germany's problems, and the Holocaust ensued.

There are reasons why misinformation spreads easily. It often provides simple answers to complex questions that require some mental effort to understand. It often assigns blame to someone else or some ill-defined powerful group for problems that have multiple causes, including one's own mistakes or laziness; it's much easier to believe a simplistic conspiracy theory than take the time to actually investigate the truth. It often appeals to prejudices that may be ingrained in family or societal culture, or may even be the result of evolutionary biology -- the phenomenon of "othering".

Whatever the causes, misinformation is a far, far greater threat than censorship.

The level of deceptive and fraudulent content on Meta platforms in Thailand is completely unacceptable: all manner of scams; comments run by paid promoters and bots; some job ads for criminal activities masquerading as legitimate opportunities, and others that require "deposits" or "processing fees"; and fake news posts, doctored to look like they are from publications such as the Bangkok Post, but actually link to fraudulent websites. (No matter how many times these ads are reported, they constantly reappear.)

For Mr Zuckerberg, the negative consequences that someone's legitimate comment is censored far outweigh the cost of allowing disinformation, hate speech and scammers to exploit the neediest -- and therefore most vulnerable -- users. But have you ever had one of your Facebook posts or comments censored, or do you know anyone who has? Thought not. On the other hand, have you ever seen misinformation, scams and hate speech on Facebook? Thought so.

On the trade-off between free speech on the right and freedom from scams and disinformation on the left, Mr Zuckerberg -- like his new American masters -- has taken a step even further to the extreme right. It's wrong for Thailand, and it's wrong for the world. In the name of "freedom of expression", the truth has been marginalised.

Replacing trained, professional fact-checkers with "user-generated community notes" can only increase the amount of misinformation on Facebook, Instagram and Threads. It will only increase the role of Meta's platforms as playgrounds for trolls, conspiracy theorists, propaganda merchants, hostile foreign governments and scammers.

With freedom comes responsibility. Meta should be held accountable for the toxic content spilling off its platforms. It is time for the government to hold this multi-billion dollar company criminally and financially liable for its damage to the people of Thailand.

Dave Kendall is a senior journalist at the 'Bangkok Post' and host/producer of the Deeper Dive vodcast. You can see it at spotf.fi/ojQ4zZo -- or just search for "Deeper Dive Thailand" wherever you get your podcasts.

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