FACT UNCHECKING

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Meta was ending its longstanding fact-checking program to curtail the spread of misinformation across social media, in a stark sign of how the company was repositioning itself for the Trump presidency and unfettered speech online.

Misinformation researchers said Meta’s decision was deeply concerning....




“It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression”, Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, said in a video announcing the changes, "the company’s fact-checking system had reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship”.

Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, would now allow more speech, rely on its users to correct inaccurate and false posts, and take a more personalized approach to political content. 

Mr. Zuckerberg conceded there would be more “bad stuff” on the platforms as a result of the decision, "but we’ll also reduce the number of innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally take down”.

Why didn't they think about improving the system?

Donald Trump, during his first administration, accused social media platforms of censoring conservative voices. Meta has sharply shifted its strategy in response to what Mr. Zuckerberg called a “cultural tipping point” from the election.




Mr. Zuckerberg dined with Mr. Trump at Mar-a-Lago in November, and Meta later donated $1 million to support Mr. Trump’s inauguration. Last week, Mr. Zuckerberg elevated Joel Kaplan, the highest-ranking Meta executive closest to the Republican Party, to the company’s most senior policy role. And on Monday, Mr. Zuckerberg said Dana White, the head of the Ultimate Fighting Championship and an ally of Mr. Trump’s, would join Meta’s board.

The influence of Elon Musk also loomed large over Meta’s shift. Since buying X in 2022, Mr. Musk has thrown out the platform’s restrictions on online speech and has turned to a program called Community Notes, which depends on X’s users to police false and misleading content. Mr. Musk, who has become a key adviser to Mr. Trump, also moved X to Texas and out of California, where it had been based, and has criticized California’s policies.

Nicole Gill, a founder and the executive director of the digital watchdog organization Accountable Tech, said Mr. Zuckerberg was “reopening the floodgates to the exact same surge of hate, disinformation and conspiracy theories that caused Jan. 6 — and that continue to spur real-world violence”.

Meta to End Fact-Checking Program in Shift Ahead of Trump Term

Mike Isaac Theodore Schleifer New York Times







Social media has always acted as something of a funhouse mirror to society as a whole. 

The algorithms and amplifications of an always-online existence have helped accentuate the worst parts of our lives, while tucking in and hiding the best. It’s part of why we’re so polarised today, with two tribes shouting past one another on social media into a gaping chasm of hopelessness.

Zuckerberg has said that the platform, which has more than 3 billion people worldwide logging on to its apps every day, will be adopting an Elon Musk-style community notes format for policing what is and isn’t acceptable speech on its platforms. 

The Meta CEO all but admitted that the move was politically motivated, confessing that “restrictions on topics like immigration and gender […] are out of touch with mainstream discourse”. 

He admitted to past “censorship mistakes” and said he would “work with President Trump to push back against foreign governments going after American companies to censor more” (just four years ago, Meta suspended Donald Trump from Facebook and Instagram for two years for inciting the violence that racked the Capitol on 6 January 2021).

This is an extinction-level event for the idea of objective truth on social media – an organism that was already on life support, but was clinging on in part because Meta was willing to fund independent factchecking organisations in order to try to maintain some element of truthfulness, free from political bias. 

Night is day. Up is down. Meta is X. Mark Zuckerberg is Elon Musk. Buckle in for a turbulent, vitriolic and fact-free four years online.




Meta’s owner Mark Zuckerberg praised the US for what he said was the “strongest constitutional protections for free expression in the world”. He contrasted that with the EU, where he claimed there was “an ever-increasing number of laws institutionalising censorship and making it difficult to build anything innovative there”.

Zuckerberg also pointed to other less democratic regimes such as those in Latin America, where, he said, “secret courts can order companies to quietly take things down” and China, which had censored Meta’s apps from working in the country.

He said the only way to combat what he called a global trend of censorship was by working with the US Government, which was hard under the progressive Biden administration (in August 2024, Zuckerberg had admitted Meta was “pressured” by President Joe Biden’s administration to censor certain content; in the 2020 US  election cycle, the FBI pushed his company to demote reporting on “potential Russian disinformation” about Biden’s son Hunter, who was mired in scandals and corruption).

The European Union has always supported Meta’s use of third-party fact-checkers in several ways while criticising the community note system on rival X, owned by Elon Musk. In October 2023 the European Commission gave €850,000 to support EU fact-checkers in identifying and debunking disinformation. Organisations such as the European Digital Media Observatory and European Fact-Checking Standards network all received funding.

The EU has implemented its Strengthened Code of Practice on Disinformation, which requires platforms including Meta to report on their compliance with measures “to combat disinformation”. That was required under the bloc’s Digital Services Act (DSA).

Previously, the EC had taken a critical stance toward X after it abandoned its former content moderation policies, which Musk argued were politically biased and infringed free speech. The body threatened to hit X with significant fines and former Commissioner Thierry Breton repeatedly challenged Musk.



The United States accused a Sudanese paramilitary group and its proxies of committing genocide, singling them out in a conflict of unchecked brutality and drawing fresh attention to the scale of atrocities being perpetrated in Africa’s largest war.

Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said the Rapid Support Forces, the paramilitary group fighting against Sudan’s military, had committed acts of genocide, including a fearsome wave of ethnically targeted violence in the western region of Darfur.

The Treasury Department backed the determination of genocide with a raft of sanctions targeting the R.S.F.’s leader, Gen. Mohamed Hamdan, as well as seven companies in the United Arab Emirates, the group’s main foreign sponsor, that have traded in weapons and gold on his behalf.

“The R.S.F. and allied militias have systematically murdered men and boys — even infants — on an ethnic basis, and deliberately targeted women and girls from certain ethnic groups for rape and other forms of brutal sexual violence”, Mr. Blinken said in a statement. “Those same militias have targeted fleeing civilians, murdering innocent people escaping conflict, and prevented remaining civilians from accessing lifesaving supplies”.

The civil war has driven one of Africa’s largest countries into a devastating famine, killed tens of thousands of people and forced more than 11 million people — almost one-quarter of Sudan’s population — to flee their homes, according to the United Nations.

Atrocities and war crimes have been committed on both sides. The military has repeatedly massacred civilians in indiscriminate bombing raids, sometimes killing dozens at once.





The R.S.F. has been accused of ethnic cleansing, particularly during a systematic violence in Darfur between April 2023 — when the civil war began — and November of that year. Its fighters, who are mostly ethnic Arabs, targeted members of the Masalit, a non-Arab ethnic group, in a brutal assault that became a central element of the American genocide determination.

The toll of that violence is unclear. The Sudanese Red Crescent said it counted 2,000 bodies in a single day, then stopped counting. U.N. investigators later estimated that as many as 15,000 people were killed in the city of Geneina alone.




General Hamdan, the R.S.F. leader, is a one-time camel trader who rose to prominence as a mid-ranking Janjaweed commander in the 2000s. Once a loyal ally of Sudan’s autocratic ruler, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, who was overthrown in 2019, General Hamdan got rich after he seized Sudan’s biggest gold mine, and by sending mercenaries to Yemen.

The genocide determination may bring new scrutiny to the role of the United Arab Emirates in the war. The Emirates has supplied the R.S.F. with smuggled weapons and powerful drones, according to American officials and visual evidence collected by The New York Times. The Emirates also provides a crucial financial and logistical hub where the R.S.F. can trade gold and procure weapons through a vast network of companies.

Capital Tap Holding, one of the seven Emirati companies sanctioned, manages another 50 companies in 10 countries that have supplied the R.S.F. with money and military equipment, the Treasury Department said. Another company, AZ Gold, traded millions of dollars in gold.

Critics have accused the United States of acting too slowly. “It’s too late and too many people have died for that to happen”, said Cameron Hudson, a former American diplomat and Sudan expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. 

The Biden administration refused to declare Israel’s campaign in the Gaza Strip a genocide against Palestinians.

Sudanese Paramilitary Group Committed Genocide, U.S. Says

Declan Walsh New York Times



Swiss Federal Prosecutor Stefan Blättler has called for decisive action against gang crime in his country.

While the country has suffered incidents related to jihadism and organised crime, Blättler said: “It must not be the case that rival gangs from organised crime fight each other on the streets. We have to be careful that we don’t end up with conditions like those in the suburbs in Belgium or Sweden, where the traces of gang crime have now become clearly visible – with shootings, dozens of deaths and protection rackets”.

Both Belgium and Sweden have received a large number of migrants in recent decades. In both countries, an ever-growing drug trade in particular is believed to be operated by criminals with a foreign background.

Belgium and the Netherlands have suffered under the so-called “Mocro Mafia”, consisting of various criminal organisations predominantly — but not exclusively — made up of people of Moroccan descent.

They often use extreme violence, resorting to explosives and automatic weapons. Grenade attacks and fire bombings have happened on numerous occasions in the port city of Antwerp, while Brussels, the capital of Europe, has experienced a rash of deadly shootings.



In Sweden, gangs such as the so-called “Kalo network” and “Foxtrot”, allegedly led by Rawa Majid, also known as the “Kurdish Fox”, dominate the illegal drugs world marked by violent turf wars.

The rise of such gangs has often been attributed by experts to inadequate integration policies for immigrants and socio-economic challenges faced by these communities.




In late December 2024, a popular gangster rapper with Syrian roots, Gaboro, was shot dead. His alleged murder was later put online in a video.

Since 2018, Sweden has seen a wave of bombings, a crime that was not categorised separately prior to that year. The number of grenade attacks in 2016 was similar to that of Mexico, a country ridden with drugs gangs and a very high murder rate.





In 1935, the English statesman Thomas More was canonised on the four hundredth anniversary of his martyrdom by beheading at Tower Hill. He was not in our sense a saint, for he dealt ruthlessly with Protestant dissidents and applauded their incineration at the stake. However, his idealised vision for mankind was revealed in his work, "Utopia", a perfect society in which the barbarity of capital punishment did not exist. But it did in his world, as he was to discover, in the terrifying dystopia created by Henry VIII.

As first minister of the crown of the day, it could be said that his place in British life has been taken by Keir Starmer, the current prime minister who was chief crown prosecutor when gangs of Muslim men across England were unmolestedly grooming and raping tens of thousands of white underage girls. 

In Oxford, a Mohammed Karrar had prepared his victim “for gang anal rape by using a pump… At one point she had four men inside her. A red ball was placed in her mouth to keep her quiet”. Anna from Bradford at the age of 14 had made repeated reports of rape, abuse, and coercion. When she “married” her abuser in a traditional Islamic wedding, her social worker attended the ceremony. In Telford, Lucy Lowe died at 16 alongside her mother and sister when her abuser set fire to her home in 2000. She had given birth to Azhar Ali Mahmood’s child when she was just 14, and was again pregnant when she was killed”.

When Elon Musk recently added his voice to calls for a national enquiry into the grooming gangs, Starmer said he was “jumping on the bandwagon of the far right”. And very possibly, Starmer really does believe that protecting little white girls from rapists is the diseased pre-occupation of racist bigots. 

In the meantime, London has also become the acid-attack capital of Europe, with 752 such assaults in 2022 alone, or over two a day. Because of the racial dimension to these attacks – the perpetrators are usually of Indian/Pakistani origin – feminist groups have strangely silent about them, again because raising the issue might be perceived to be racist. 

Ordinary adult-rape in England has increased sixfold in the past ten years. 10 per cent of men charged with rape are black: approximately one in fiftieth of the population is responsible for one tenth of all rapes.





Furthermore, there were 15,000 recorded incidents of “knife-crime” in London last year. Two-thirds of knife-crimes involve black or minority ethnic young males. Most of the victims are also young black males, though the opposite fiction – that black males are disproportionately victims of white racist gangs – has been officially endorsed by the British Government with Prime Minister Theresa May declaring April 22nd  forever to be known as “Stephen Lawrence Day”, in honour of a black teenager who was stabbed to death by white youths in 1993. Since that dreadful crime, hundreds of black youths have been knifed to death by other black youths.

During the past quarter of a century, half a dozen English cities, including London, have become ethnically and culturally alien, with Caucasians in the demographic minority. Many of these immigrants arrived after Prime Minister Blair secretly opened the doors to an immigration surge. 
 
Yes, Liberal England is well and truly dead, because those who governed her wanted her dead.

Vulgarity, crime, rapes, coarsening of public life, liberal England is gone

Brussels Signal


VISIONI




As Trump’s second inauguration nears, art about female rage has shifted inward. Increasingly, women are at war with their own bodies, often manifesting as body horror. Men don’t have to physically subjugate them; women do it themselves. 

In writer-director Coralie Fargeat’s “The Substance”, Demi Moore’s aging celebrity never lashes out at Dennis Quaid’s pig of an exec when he fires her from her show for getting old. She’s humiliated, but tacitly she agrees with him — enough to inject her spine with a serum that creates a younger doppelganger who can live her life half the time for her. Ultimately, in a spectacular fight scene, these two women tear at each other till they fuse into a monster.




In Marielle Heller’s “Nightbitch”, based on Rachel Yoder’s eponymous novel, Amy Adams’ fine arts painter turned stay-at-home mom sprouts fur and a straggly tail, her teeth and sense of smell sharpening, till each night she morphs into a dog.

 


In Halina Reijn’s “Babygirl”, Nicole Kidman’s CEO “has it all”, that nausea-inducing phrase that itself suggests suffocating constriction. Kidman’s character has never had an orgasm with her husband, and when she tries to state her need to be sexually dominated, she has to put a sheet over her head or a pillow over her face. 

The projects do capture how misogyny infiltrates the body. The stakes are higher now: your income, your health, your freedom, your life.

These auteurs undoubtedly believe they’re critiquing that mode of thought. But while those intentions land, the real culprits seem to escape mostly unscathed. 


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