Where misinformation proliferates: How to make social media less awful

You can also help make Facebook and Instagram less awful and make sure they call a spade a spade – and a cat a cat.

By GIL HOFFMAN JANUARY 19, 2025 04:53

IF IT walks like a dog and purrs like a dog... (photo credit: TWITTER)

One of the most mocked examples of fact checking on social media is a post by anti-Israel journalist Sulaiman Ahmed, who described a picture of a kid feeding a feline in front of the Dome of the Rock shrine by writing “Palestinian boy shares his bread with a dog.”

PALESTINIAN BOY SHARES HIS BREAD WITH A DOG pic.twitter.com/POXYXebuzc

— Sulaiman Ahmed (@ShaykhSulaiman) October 27, 2023

The community note underneath the picture posted on X points out the obvious: “That’s a cat.” And just in case anyone still had any doubts, there is a link to a Wikipedia page defining “cat.”

My first reaction last week when Meta announced its decision to adopt a similar system of community notes to replace its fact checking was to think that there will soon be a lot more cats misidentified by a lot more morons.

“We will end the current third-party fact checking program in the United States and instead begin moving to a community notes program,” Meta Chief Global Affairs Officer Joel Kaplan wrote. “We’ve seen this approach work on X – where they empower their community to decide when posts are potentially misleading and need more context, and people across a diverse range of perspectives decide what sort of context is helpful for other users to see.

“We think this could be a better way of achieving our original intention of providing people with information about what they’re seeing – and one that’s less prone to bias.”

Meta will compensate half a million users in Germany €100 (credit: REUTERS)

While it’s nice that they aim to have less bias, it’s justifiable to assume the sky is about to fall for Israel and the Jewish people on powerful platforms.

More than 77% of Internet users – some 3.59 billion people – are active on at least one platform of Meta, which is the parent company of Instagram, Facebook, Threads, and WhatsApp.

To illustrate the power of wrong information on social media, the podcast of Channel 12 recalled that Syrian hackers posted from the Associated Press account in April 2013 that there had been two explosions in the White House that wounded then-president Barack Obama. The obviously incorrect post led to panicking in the stock market and $139 million erased in one day.

There is plenty of reason to believe that Meta’s decision is bad for the Jews and the Jewish state. After all, Jews and other supporters of Israel make up a negligible fraction of the Meta “community.” Submitting notes with our point of view is the equivalent of David using a slingshot against a massive army of Goliaths.

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Kaplan’s concession that “community notes will require agreement between people with a range of perspectives to help prevent biased ratings” does not mitigate this extreme disadvantage.

There are not nearly enough people on the other side admitting that anything our side says is true. And there are too many people willing to lie through their teeth about Jews and Israel to know that crowdsourcing doesn’t work.

Just look at X, whose community notes system is the model for Facebook. Posts correcting an inaccurate 60 Minutes report about Gaza on CBS this week did not attract enough people deeming them “helpful” to be posted.

Anti-Israel Guardian columnist Owen Jones posted lies about “overwhelming evidence of Israeli soldiers repeatedly perpetrating sexual violence against Palestinians” and “Israeli government ministers rioting on the streets of Tel Aviv in support of raping Palestinians.”

Community notes proving him wrong were met with “this note hasn’t yet been rated by enough contributors from different perspectives.” And even worse, regarding other notes explaining why added context is not needed to refute Jones, citing an article from Al Jazeera.

WHENEVER PRO-ISRAEL people refute false claims on X of a genocide in Gaza, a response inevitably comes quoting anti-Israel NGOs like Amnesty International saying that, in fact, there is. And even when pro-Israel notes are approved, they are seen by a fraction of those who saw the incorrect post itself.

The system on X is clearly flawed and regularly weaponized against Israel and the Jewish people. Instagram and Facebook adopting the same system is a recipe for potential disaster.

But then again, maybe it’s too soon to judge a system that won’t even be up and running for two more months. Perhaps Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg will handle it better than X’s Elon Musk.

While the future can only be surmised, the current system that is being replaced was unquestionably horrible for Israel, and its departure should be celebrated. It relied on fact checkers from around the world who were far from being Zionists.

The International Fact-Checking Network includes Reuters, Agence France-Presse, the Maharat Foundation of Lebanon, AkhbarMeter of Egypt, and the Palestinian Platform for Fact-checking and Media Literacy, Kashif.

A fact checker in Pakistan got reports taken down about Gazans cutting a fetus out of a pregnant Jewish woman on Oct. 7 and about Hamas taking responsibility for the Al-Ahli hospital blast. A report about Jewish students who locked themselves in a campus library during a pro-Hamas rally suffered the same fate.

ZUCKERBERG SAID last week that the fact checkers were “too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they created.” Anti-Israel fact checkers were able to get pro-Israel Facebook and Instagram pages 80% fewer views and prevent them from being found in searches.

He promised that the new system will focus enforcement on “illegal and high-severity violations” and “stop demoting fact checked content.”

“We have been over-enforcing our rules, limiting legitimate political debate and censoring too much trivial content and subjecting too many people to frustrating enforcement actions,” Kaplan admitted.

What will stay?

Meta’s community standards on terror, antisemitism, and Holocaust denial, which prevent posts praising Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Oct. 7 attacks. They won’t be allowed in the community notes, either.

Just this week, anti-Israel activist Jackson Hinkle attempted to return to Instagram, where he was banned in March due to efforts by the pro-Israel media watchdog HonestReporting. The initial ban came after Hinkle was caught spreading misinformation, praising then-Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad as a “hero,” and posting doctored photographs “meeting” world leaders, such as the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.

Soon after Hinkle posted about his return, we alerted Meta, which promptly banned him again for violating its community standards. HonestReporting will continue to push for such accountability and will be able to play a larger role in Meta’s new system. Jerusalem Post readers can also volunteer on each platform to contribute.

In order to make sure its corrections of incorrect anti-Israel reports are seen, we produced 255 videos in 2024. The average HonestReporting video is seen by an entire football stadium full of people, and there were 36,232,603 engagements with our content in just one year.

We put such effort into content creation and meeting people in places and spaces where misinformation proliferates because we can reach a lot more people by creating content discussing truth than via a correction in a newspaper or a community note on social media.

You can also help make Facebook and Instagram less awful and make sure they call a spade a spade – and a cat a cat. ■

The writer is executive director of the pro-Israel media watchdog HonestReporting. He served as chief political correspondent and analyst of The Jerusalem Post for 24 years.