Social media sites and their users risk fragmenting along political lines in light of Donald Trump’s election win, experts have told Sky News.
They added some of the world’s biggest social media platforms fell into line behind the new US government after November’s election victory.
X’s Elon Musk backed Mr Trump in the election and he has since taken up a federal advisory role.
Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg recently announced an overhaul in his sites’ content moderation, removing third-party fact-checkers in the US and bringing in community notes.
This move was a “performative choice” to align behind the new administration, according to Nina Jankowicz, former head of a disinformation board in the US Department of Homeland Security.
As a result, established social media sites, as well as newer platforms like Bluesky and Mastodon, risk fragmenting along political lines as users split to engage more with content they like, Melissa Ingle, who worked in political disinformation at Twitter before Mr Musk’s takeover, told Sky News.
The effect of this could be an intense “atomisation” of social media users over the coming years into different silos, as people with different beliefs fragment and migrate to different sites, embedding existing divisions and polarisation, Ms Ingle said.
Researchers raised concerns to Sky News about the effects this may have – both online and beyond.
Meta ‘could have kept fact-checking’
Meta said removing third-party fact-checking was an attempt to reform an overly complex system and improve freedom of speech on the platform.
Mr Zuckerberg referenced “recent elections” when announcing his decision, and speaking before his inauguration, NBC News reported Mr Trump said the move was “probably” in response to threats he had made in the past.
But Ms Jankowicz said the choice Meta faced was never an “either/or equation”.
“Zuckerberg could have kept third-party fact-checking to inform content moderation and introduced community notes to quell the concerns of the Trumps and Musks of the world,” she said.
Ms Ingle pointed out that removing disinformation, bias and misinformation entirely was an unrealistic goal, and instead, such platforms should utilise a range of tools to best help users – a sentiment others repeated.
“Just because it [third-party fact-checking] is an imperfect system doesn’t mean you throw it away,” Ms Ingle said.
Content moderation, in its current form, came in largely after the 2016 US election, and sites took steps to protect their information ecosystems.
But Meta’s most recent move will “hurt” users looking to avoid disinformation, Angie Drobnic Holan, director of the International Fact-Checking Network, said.
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‘Cosying up to the president’
Both Mr Zuckerberg and Mr Musk were at Mr Trump’s inauguration, with the latter making a speech afterwards.
Ms Ingle said, in light of Mr Musk’s support of Mr Trump, X risked “becoming [like] a state-sponsored media, it risks being something that explicitly boosts the government”.
She added: “We’ve never had the head of social media apps this explicitly cosying up to a president.”
In light of the most recent announcement from Mr Zuckerberg, Ms Jankowicz said: “We now have all three major US social media platforms in the hands of overtly-Trump-aligned oligarchs.
“This sort of consolidation is usually something that only happens in autocracies, which begs the question of what the United States is on day one of the second Trump presidency.”
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Trump could help tech giants take on foreign governments
The decisions of X and Meta come, not just in light of the recent US election, but after both have clashed with foreign governments in recent years.
Meta was hit with a €1.2bn (£1bn) fine by the EU, and Mr Musk had a public spat with Brazil, which led to the platform being banned until it paid a 28 million reais (£3.8m) fine.
In his video announcement, Mr Zuckerberg spoke about working with Mr Trump to “push back on governments around the world” – giving further indication of what social media sites may be like under the new US administration.
Citing the battle as one over censorship, it could set the field of play for the coming years as US social media companies align with Mr Trump, and seemingly hope to reap the benefits in return.
It may already be happening. In a speech at Davos, Mr Trump complained about the treatment of US companies in the EU, adding: “Nobody’s happy with it and we are going to do something about it.”
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‘The good, bad and ugly’
Announcing its removal of third-party fact-checkers, Meta said its existing systems had grown too complex and it wanted to allow more speech while focusing enforcement on illegal and “high-severity” violations.
It added while “the good, bad and ugly” could all be on display on a platform, it was important to maintain freedom of expression.
After a 2021 move to limit the amount of “civic content” users could see – like political news – the platform said it was reversing that decision.
Meta added: “Too much harmless content gets censored, too many people find themselves wrongly locked up in ‘Facebook jail’, and we are often too slow to respond when they do.”
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X has been approached for comment.
