Will Facebook moderation rules change affect Armenia - expert's opinion (EXCLUSIVE)
YEREVAN, 8 January. /ARKA/. It's too early to talk about the impact of Facebook moderation rules change on Armenia, says information security expert Samvel Martirosyan.
Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg said the corporation will get rid of fact-checkers, ‘significantly reduce censorship’ and increase the amount of recommended political content.
‘It's too early to tell what the impact will be on Armenia. The approach to fact-checking is changing. Facebook has relied on an independent fact-checking network in recent times. These are organisations gathered around the Poynter Institute and carry out fact-checking - this is also in place in Armenia. Their decisions were sent to Meta, and based on that the page views were reduced if it was confirmed that the information was false,’ Martirosyan said in an interview with ARKA News Agency.
The expert noted that now this system will be replaced by a similar system in X, when the community itself checks the facts and votes on whether the information is true or not.
Asked how this might affect political advertising in Armenia, Martirosyan noted that political publications were checked by Meta's internal system even before these changes.
‘By a large account Facebook, especially before the elections , takes political advertising very seriously, and it is possible that in the case of Armenia, they will be more careful in moderating regardless of the decisions made, because there will be elections in 2026,’ he said.
The factchecker cooperation programme was launched in 2016 amid allegations of poor moderation that facilitated interference in the US presidential election, CNN noted. Meta partnered with fact-checkers certified by the International Fact Checking Network, launched by the Poynter Institute. Content that fact-checkers flagged as false was labelled accordingly and downgraded.
Trump accused Zuckerberg of conspiring against him during the 2020 election and threatened ‘the rest of his life in prison’ if he interfered with the vote in 2024. After they took place, Trump had dinner at his Mar-a-Lago residence with the head of Meta, Bloomberg wrote. According to Stephen Miller, an adviser to the president-elect, Zuckerberg was ‘very clear about his desire to be an advocate and participant in the changes we're seeing across America.’ Late last year, Meta donated $1 million to Trump's inaugural fund, something it had not done before. -0-