Meta’s upcoming move to replace its third-party fact checkers with a Community Notes feature isn’t sitting well with everyone. Following CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement last week, a host of users took to Google to search for help on how to delete their Facebook, Instagram, and Threads accounts, according to Google Trends data spotted by TechCrunch.
The jump in such searches was felt most keenly over the two days directly following Zuckerberg’s announcement. Google searches for topics such as “how to permanently delete facebook” reached a top score of 100, a sign of the largest level of interest on Google Trends.
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Other related searches such as “how to delete all photos facebook,” “alternative to facebook,” “how to quit facebook,” “how to delete threads account,” and “how to delete instagram account without logging in” also saw a surge in popularity, some as high as 5,000% over prior periods, TechCrunch reported.
The number of such searches has since calmed down, so the initial rise seems more like a knee-jerk reaction. And who knows how many of those people will follow through on their desire to quit any of Meta’s social networks. But the backlash is a sign that people were caught off guard by Meta’s move, leading to concerns about how it may affect their own posts and the posts they view.
Due to replace the current fact-checking process, Meta’s new Community Notes will be similar to the feature of the same name on Elon Musk’s X. Instead of using third parties to assess the accuracy of posts and ads, the platforms would task volunteers from the user community to render their collective verdicts. The approach would be much more hands-off with only illegal and critical infractions, such as terrorism, child sexual exploitation, drugs, fraud, and scams, automatically taken down by Meta.
In touting the new process, Zuckerberg argued that the current fact-checking system results in too many mistakes and too much censorship. However, he also acknowledged that less bad stuff would be caught. Whether or not someone is OK with that depends largely on what they consider “bad stuff.”
Will there be more content that purposely tries to be offensive, insulting, and inaccurate? Will Facebook, Instagram, and Threads become more like X? If so, those searches on how to quit these platforms could easily spike again.
