Another interesting week for Meta, as the response to its sudden decision to “abandon the use of independent fact checkers” on Facebook raises hackles worldwide. “Starting in the U.S., we are ending our third party fact-checking program and moving to a Community Notes model,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted on Tuesday, with his new plan to adopt the same form of audience monitoring that Elon Musk has introduced to X (formerly Twitter).
But less than 48-hours later, as first noticed by TechCrunch, the move prompted a viral surge in “Google searches for how to cancel and delete Facebook, Instagram, and Threads accounts.” The news site described the data — pulled from Google Trends — as “explosive,” noting that “the consequences of Meta’s new policies could have serious implications for the types of posts, hateful and violent speech, and misinformation that can spread even faster than they already do.”
Commenting on the surge, Gizmodo suggested that “apparently not everyone is ready to live in a post-truth world… Fittingly, Facebook competitors are also seeing a spike in interest. Bluesky saw a nearly 1,000% increase in searches during the same period that saw people looking to exit the Meta-verse of social apps.”
According to TechCrunch, “the backlash has been swift. Interest in searches related to getting off Meta platforms soared this week, particularly in the last two days. Google searches for terms like ‘how to permanently delete facebook’ hit a maximum score of 100 — the highest level of interest possible on Google Trends.”
Deleting Facebook — or not — has been a recurring theme over the years, as the company has built a social media empire that touches more than half the world’s population. But it has survived backlash after backlash, as various parts of its algorithmic-driven data harvesting have come under increasing scrutiny. But ultimately users need their fix and there are few if any alternatives — there will be even less if TikTok is actually banned in the U.S.
“It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression,” Zuckerberg explained, adding that he “started building social media to give people a voice.” Moving forward, Facebook will see the same community notes “we’ve seen 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.”
Quite what happens next is anybody’s guess — but pushing responsibility for censoring and correcting content back onto the audience and away from the company does resolve accusations around company bias. And with the Trump administration just days from office, there may be some necessary thinking behind all this.
I have reached out to Meta for any comments on this sudden surge in appetite for deletion.
So, should you delete Facebook? Probably not. There’s little point. It knows who you are, where you live, what you do and who you hang out with. Its trackers underpin much of your internet use, and it has apps for every occasion. But you should definitely check the privacy settings on your devices and be mindful of what you post, search and transact when using its apps or sites. As for community notes versus fact checkers — that’s probably a case of no right answers and least worst options. The reality is there has always been too much of the wrong content and no-one has yet solved the problem.
