Fact-Checking, DEI Rollbacks, and TikTok: What Caught My Eye This Week
What better week to launch my newsletter than the one where Meta (owners of Instagram and Facebook, for those who don't keep up) announced significant changes to their fact-checking programs? Since 2021, I've been studying Community Notes—formerly known as Birdwatch during the Twitter glory days. In my dissertation, I discovered that programs allowing users like you and me to add context to posts can be beneficial in two ways: they train fact-checkers to write better content and encourage users to think more critically before posting.
Of course, these initiatives need continuous support and thoughtful adjustments from the platforms themselves—like fact-checker anonymity, which I'm currently researching.
However, this newsletter isn’t just about my research interests. My goal is to share content I find fascinating—expect links to articles, videos, and podcasts on topics related to technology businesses, tech policies, and their societal impact. While I’m passionate about politics, I’ll try to steer clear of those discussions to avoid losing more friends (lol).
This week, I’ve been closely following Meta’s fact-checking policy shift, along with several major U.S. companies (including Meta) rolling back DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) initiatives. I’m also keeping an eye on the long-anticipated TikTok ban in the U.S. I’m curious about how these policies affect different stakeholders and am working on a research project exploring these dynamics.
Subscribe to my newsletter and let me know what you’d like to see more (or less) of in the future!
Articles:
Meta's Fact-Checking Changes: How Zuckerberg’s fact-checking rollback could usher in a new, chaotic era for social media
Meta's DEI Announcement: Meta ends DEI programs
My Research on Community Notes: Democratization of Misinformation Monitoring: The Impact of Twitter’s Birdwatch Program
My Latest Paper on Community Notes: Unveiling the Impact of Privacy-Preserving Policies in Crowd-based Misinformation Monitoring Program
TikTok Ban Developments: Supreme Court appears inclined to uphold TikTok ban in US
Pictured below: My University
