Meta’s decision to end factchecking to prioritise “free speech” has prompted alarm among social media experts, as well as questions about the ethics of using its platforms such as Instagram.
The company’s billionaire founder, Mark Zuckerberg, on Tuesday announced that the platforms’ factchecking program would be replaced with X-style “community notes”, a feature that allows users to add context to posts.
More political content will be pushed on to Meta’s platforms – which also include Facebook and Threads – while certain restrictions will be removed for subjects including immigration and gender.
But is it a reason to reconsider staying on these platforms? Here’s what you need to know.
Does Meta’s announcement affect you?
The decision affects just the US for now but could expand to other jurisdictions.
The chief executive of Australia’s national newswire, Australian Associated Press, Lisa Davies, says its factchecking agency, AAP FactCheck, continues to provide services for Meta in Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific.
Prof Axel Bruns, from the Queensland University of Technology’s digital media centre, says the “problematic” decision is likely an attempt to “curry favour” with the incoming Trump administration.
“This is a real problem for everyone who’s using Meta platforms, because this really opens the door to more and more misunderstanding circulating,” Bruns says.
Should you quit Instagram?
Experts say it is a matter of personal choice.
Bruns notes Meta’s announcement so far only relates to the US and that social media users in other regions need to wait to see how it plays out online in their own area.
When it comes to Instagram, Bruns says it will be interesting to see if the platform changes – including if users start to see more “overtly political content” in their feeds.
The decision may affect people who follow a lot of US-based sources, he says.
Prof Jeannie Paterson, the director of the University of Melbourne’s Centre for AI and Digital Ethics, suggests society is “way past the time when we should be getting news content on social media anyway”.
“In a perfect world,” she says, people who were unhappy with Meta’s decision would walk away from Instagram.
“But in the real world that’s a lot harder to do,” she acknowledges. “It’s a real community of sort of small and independent creators … And that’s how they bring their products to the wider community.”
If you want to leave Instagram, what are the alternatives?
Paterson says the irony is that there are very few alternatives.
She says Twitter was a different story – noting that many people left the platform after Elon Musk bought it, renamed it X, and then became “more extreme in his views”.
But with Instagram, she says, there’s “no easy alternative” – TikTok “has its own issues” and other platforms with similar reach just aren’t there.
“[For] people who live in the country or in remote areas or minority groups or [who have] small businesses, that is a really good way for them to communicate and reach other people,” she says.
“It’s just not possible to set up an alternative at this point in time. So, to put it bluntly, we’re in a bit of deep shit, to be honest.”
There are old-school photo-sharing platforms including Flickr, Tumblr and Hipstamatic but they don’t have the reach of Instagram.
What about other Meta platforms – WhatsApp, Threads or Facebook?
A Melbourne-based digital rights activist, Samantha Floreani, raises concerns about Meta’s platforms overall.
She highlights that, in addition to ending its factchecking program, Meta is also changing its hateful conduct policy, which will dismantle protections for LGBTQ+ people, immigrants and other marginalised people.
“This, in combination with tedious targeted advertising and rampant AI slop, is set to make these platforms not just unsafe but unbearable,” Floreani says.
“There’s never a bad time to quit Instagram, Facebook and other Meta products but many – myself included – may find it hard to leave.”
Floreani says Meta has “done a great job at trampling competition”, meaning there aren’t many alternative platforms with the same “critical mass of users”.
“On one level, we need robust domestic tech regulation and more diversity of platforms available to us.
“But when it comes to the bigger picture, what we really need is to disentangle online spaces from the incentives of a ruthless growth-at-any-cost ideology.”
There are other messaging apps, such as Signal, that are growing in popularity and alternative microblogging sites including Bluesky and Mastadon.
Should you stop using social media altogether?
Australia’s Digital Rights Watch chair, Lizzie O’Shea, says Meta’s announcement is an opportunity for people to reflect on their social media usage but that they shouldn’t give it up unless they want to.
“Lots of people use it for good reasons,” she says. “Lots of people do not feel good when they use it.”
O’Shea says Meta’s decision should spur Australia’s government to enact strong privacy reforms to better protect social media users’ personal information.
While social media companies have based their business model on trying to keep users engaged to collect more data and use it to curate advertising, she says, places such as Australia could slow this extraction down with restrictions– such as those in Europe – on how much information they collect.
“[It] means that companies focus less on engagement with all the associated negative consequences, like polarising and extremist content,” O’Shea says.
Dr Joanne Gray, a lecturer in digital cultures at the University of Sydney, says social media platforms are an “important tool” that can be beneficial.
“I don’t think anyone is advocating for social media to be banned or taken away from everyone in a blanket sense,” she says. “But there are systemic and serious harms caused by these platforms.
“We should all generally be much more considered in our social media diets and see what benefits us.”
