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Wildfires in Southern California – The New York Times

Umito
Wildfires in Southern California – The New York Times

By the morning team

Wildfires are growing out of control in parts of Los Angeles. A violent windstorm fans the embers, sending dangerous smoke across the city and turning the sky an apocalyptic red.

At least four fires are burning in Southern California, near the scenic coast, in Malibu and the Pacific Palisades, as well as inland. Firefighters are having difficulty working despite the wind and the fires are not under control.

At least 30,000 people have fled. Some abandoned their cars and fled on foot to avoid congested roads. Residents of a nursing home were evacuated on stretchers, officials said. Homes, monuments and places of worship were destroyed, and authorities warned of more destruction.

Enforcing the truth on social media is a Sisyphean challenge. The sheer volume of content – ​​billions of posts in hundreds of languages ​​– makes it impossible for platforms to identify every mistake or lie people post, let alone remove them.

Yesterday, Meta – the owner of Facebook, Instagram and Threads – effectively stopped trying. The company said independent fact-checkers would no longer monitor content on its sites. The announcement marked an industry-wide setback in the fight against the falsehoods that poison public discourse online.

Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, said the new policy would mean fewer cases where platforms “accidentally” remove posts wrongly flagged as false. The tradeoff, he acknowledged, is that more “bad stuff” will pollute the content we browse.

It’s not just annoying when you open Facebook on your phone. It also eats away at our civic life. Social media apps – on which the average American spends more than two hours a day – ensure that the truth, especially in politics, is simply a matter of toxic and inconclusive debate online.

It’s easy to see why Meta made this change. With Donald Trump about to begin his second term, Zuckerberg seems to have decided that alienating half the country is bad business.

It was only four years ago that Facebook suspended Trump’s account after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, even though Zuckerberg had reservations at the time about removing a sitting president’s platform .

Since then, Republicans in Congress and in the courts having thrown decisions by social media platforms to remove posts as part of an expansion of government censorship. Washington officials had urged companies to remove some messages about election fraud and Covid vaccines. The Supreme Court took up a case over Facebook takedowns last year, but rejected it for technical reasons.

Despite this, the debate clearly worried Zuckerberg. In August, he wrote a mea culpa to the Republican congressman who made the accusation against the platforms. He said Meta should have denounced what he called “government pressure” to remove certain content.

Yesterday, the company went further in court. New GOP political chief Meta, a former Republican operative, told Fox News there was “too much political bias” in the fact-checking program. Zuckerberg is even considering moving trust and safety teams — those responsible for policing all kinds of content — from California to Texas to “allay concerns that biased employees are excessively censoring content.” The company named Dana White, a close Trump ally, to its board of directors.

Meta does not entirely abdicate responsibility for what appears on its platforms. It will still remove posts containing illegal activities, hate speech and pornography, for example.

But like other platforms, it is leaving the political space in order to maintain its market share. Elon Musk bought Twitter (now called X) with the promise of unlimited free speech. It also invited users banned for bad behavior back. And it replaced content moderation teams with collaborative “community notes” under contested content. YouTube made a similar change last year. Now Meta is also adopting this model.

Numerous studies have shown the proliferation of hateful and tendentious content on Users spent more time liking and reposting articles from authoritarian governments and terrorist groups, including the Islamic State and Hamas. Musk himself regularly peddles conspiratorial ideas on political issues such as migration and gender to his 211 million followers.

Allowing users to weigh in on the validity of a message – such as one claiming that vaccines cause autism or that no one was hurt in the January 6 attack – is promising, researchers say. Today, when enough people comment on X, a note appears below the disputed material. But this process takes time and is susceptible to manipulation. By then, the lie may have gone viral and the damage is done.

Maybe people still want something more reliable. This is the promise of newcomers like Bluesky. What happened at X could be a warning. Users and, more importantly, advertisers fled.

It’s also possible that people value entertainment and opinions they agree with more than strict adherence to the truth. If so, the Internet might be a place where it’s even more difficult to separate fact from fiction.

To find out more: Zuckerberg, tired of criticism, has abandoned his apologetic approach to issues on his platforms. Read about Zuckerberg’s political transformation.

Intruder: The Panama Canal expanded to accommodate larger ships. Then the overgrown saltwater fish.

Letter of recommendation: Sign language can help us all communicate better.

Do you have 5 minutes to spare? Listen here to fall in love with jazz guitar.

Lives lived: Pippa Garner was an art provocateur whose modified consumer goods—like a bare-bones man’s “half suit” and a ’59 Chevy with its inverted chassis—offered witty commentary on gender, bodies, and limits of fine arts. She died at 82.

NBA: The league’s two best teams, Cleveland and Oklahoma City, face off tonight in a potential Finals preview. At 31-4, Cleveland is win at a record pace.

NFL: Las Vegas fired coach Antonio Pierce after just one full season. Possible candidates for his replacement include former Raiders coach Jon Gruden.

College basketball: No. 1 Tennessee, previously the last undefeated men’s team, suffered a 73-43 rout against No. 6 Florida.

You can get New York-style pizza in Rexburg, Idaho that’s so good you’d swear you were in Greenwich Village. This is a sign that the New York slice has become an object of fascination for food nerds far beyond the city.