—— In-Class Connections —–
Professor Terry Lindvall applied Plato’s Allegory of the Cave to social media. The allegory creates a scenario of an individual bound to a cave, with a perspective limited to the shadows cast upon the walls.
Elliot Fylstra|Marlin Chronicle
Following changes to Meta’s fact-checking, community members discuss its implications on social media usage and strategies for seeking truth in news.
Meta platforms have dropped external fact-checking services in a decision that followed the 2024 election.
A New York Times article said Facebook, Threads and Instagram will “instead rely on users to add notes to posts.”
The article from January said, “Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, said it would now allow more speech, rely on its users to correct inaccurate and false posts, and take a more personalized approach to political content.”
The article referred to how Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Meta Platforms, made the announcement. “It described the changes with the language of regret, saying it had strayed too far from its values over the previous decade,” the article said.
Dr. Stu Minnis, chair and professor of Media and Communication, provided perspective on social media as a news source.
“If you’re getting your news from social media, you’re almost certainly being misled,” Minnis said. Minnis cautioned against using social media for news altogether.
“I feel like at some point we’ve got to, as a society, figure out that this is not a good way to get our information,” Minnis said.
“If you’re getting your news from social media, you’re almost certainly being misled,” Minnis said.
Concerning fact-checking policy decisions from the platform, Minnis used the word “amoral” to describe Zuckerberg. “I don’t think that he has much interest in what’s good for society or what’s bad for society. I think he has a very pragmatic, libertarian outlook about strategy, about the company, and if public opinion is moving one way, he’ll follow it there,” Minnis said.
Minnis elaborated on what he presumed to be Meta’s motivations. “When they do seem to be making trust and safety efforts, fact-checking and various other mechanisms for hopefully reducing misinformation, they seem to be mostly empty PR efforts,” Minnis said, adding that the same concept applied for when they removed them.
X is often looped in with Meta in these criticisms. “I think right now this shows how much we cannot trust those in power and those who run things like Instagram, Meta, X,” junior Meadow Schmitt said. “I think no matter how accurate they are, it is always the best to look into it for yourself.”
Alumnus Shawn Grimmer (‘94) vouched for alternatives to Meta and X. Grimmer advocated for Virginia Wesleyan to use Bluesky, a rising social media platform that compares to X.
Grimmer’s background shaped his stance on fact-checking. In delivering prescriptions to AIDS patients, Grimmer encountered the impact of misinformation throughout his career. His career in sports journalism and broadcasting strengthened his passion for accuracy.
“The fact that Meta has decided to remove their fact checkers or reduce the number is very dangerous to me,” Grimmer said.
He spoke on the online migration of different parties. “Especially after the elections, a lot of science groups and scientists were leaving X and coming over to Bluesky,” Grimmer said.
Grimmer reached out to VWU’s Office of Marketing & Communications to pitch the usage of Bluesky. In this correspondence, Grimmer said the department “didn’t really indicate that they were showing much concern, just based on the low numbers there.”
In a poll posted on The Marlin Chronicle’s Instagram story on Feb. 8, 57 participants responded according to which statement about Bluesky applied to them.
Out of this sample size, 31 have never heard of Bluesky, 14 know of Bluesky but never made an account, 6 have made a Bluesky account but don’t use it and 6 use Bluesky.
Lily Reslink|Marlin Chronicle
Grimmer said that he was not necessarily asking the university to leave platforms they currently use, but he felt that Bluesky “would be a good platform to at least seek some claim.”
Grimmer personally chose to abandon X and Meta platforms. “I completely dropped off of all Meta.” One thing Grimmer misses from these platforms is the connections. He said he looked forward to seeing posts that celebrated Wesleyan’s accomplishments, especially in sports. “I reposted them with pride,” Grimmer said.
To Grimmer, social media means a lot to the alumni network. “It’s something I’m missing a lot more that I didn’t know that I would miss,” which he said motivated his outreach to the university.
Minnis said this recreational use of social media is separate from relying on it for factual news. He said, “We might make fun of grandma for always posting cat memes, but she’s not destroying democracy, right?”
Minnis pointed to the logistics of mass content management. “Let’s say you’re in charge of ‘trust and safety’ of Facebook. You’ve got literally billions of posts being put up per day. How do you fact-check that?” Minnis explained that as “a mechanism for information that’s designed for ordinary people to put their letter in,” content moderation for social media is “fantastically difficult.”
“There are ways to check facts about the world. The question is ‘can a social media system effectively implement that?’ And unfortunately, I think the answer is no,” Minnis said.
Senior Judah King said that it is common for people to “take what is being put out to us at face value.” He suggested that it often takes further research to distinguish between fact and bias. He said this is important as a college student, with higher education institutions serving as a hub for topical discussions.
“I think we as a culture have been so eager to rush away from the institutions of legacy media, that we failed to realize the cost that’s been paid for that now that the information we get is completely uncurated,” Minnis said.
Minnis pointed to the differences from when print media was the predominant news source and broke down the operational differences of print publications. “There were reputational, financial and possibly legal repercussions for publishing outright falsehoods for sure, and there was an editorial team that could know exactly what was getting published,” Minnis said.
According to Minnis, the cultural impact of social media as a platform for news is “destructive,” and has “been a problem since the beginning of social media, arguably, since the beginning of the internet as a public platform in the 90s.”
Minnis referenced legislative attempts at statewide content moderation policies. “Texas and Florida both passed laws that actually made it illegal for social media platforms to do any content moderation. Those two laws collectively got struck down because that’s a different kind of censorship,” Minnis said. He explained that the Supreme Court rendered these unconstitutional.
Minnis pointed out existing strategies for fact-checking on social media, including a team of people with the role of filtering, AI algorithms and user moderation (i.e. report systems).
Regarding these systems, Minnis said, “It’s not just that they’re never going to be perfect. They’re never going to get anywhere close to perfect, even in the best possible circumstances.”
Among other institutions, Minnis said that “journalism as an institution has been undermined.” He connected the quality of journalism to the quality of life. “I think it’s been bad for journalism, and that’s been bad for everybody.”
“Maybe this is wishful thinking on my part, but I kind of have this feeling that eventually, we’ll figure out how bad this is as a way for getting our information about the world, and we’ll change course,” Minnis said. In the meantime, he said that society must adopt a system for getting accurate information because it does not exist anymore.
By Lily Reslink
