As social media platforms undergo major shifts in how they handle information, the impact on users—and the truth—is increasingly uncertain, says a University of Michigan expert.

Oliver Haimson, assistant professor at the School of Information and the Digital Studies Institute, points to Meta, which no longer fact-checks content posted on the platforms it owns: Facebook, Instagram and Threads. Without that service, users must weed through misinformation and other harmful content getting posted, said Haimson, who has studied social media trends for nearly a dozen years.

The company announced this week that it will begin testing Community Notes, which it believes will be less biased than a third-party fact-checking program. This system, which Meta began testing broadly on its platforms March 18, is a crowdsourced method of fact-checking. 

What are your thoughts on people getting more news from social media rather than traditional news outlets?

People are finding news in a way that is more entertaining and exciting to them. They might want to see short-form videos rather than reading a newspaper article, for instance. And that’s getting more people access to news. But I think that it can be dangerous because a platform like Meta has so much control over the news landscape.

They have made a number of policy changes where they decided that they would allow news and political content. The problem is … they decided to get rid of official fact-checkers and are replacing that with Community Notes. If enough people look at it, they are assuming that they can get some kind of consensus on what is true or false. But I’m sure you can see how that’s very different from an official fact-checker who does that for a living.

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