Social media without fact-checking will destabilize the Global South

For Big Tech companies, the Global South has long been little more than an afterthought. The rollback of any form of robust or credible fact-checking on both X and Meta demonstrates this all too clearly. While the majority of X and Meta’s users remain outside of the U.S. and Europe, their content moderation policies simply shift with America’s ever-changing cultural and political tides.

Social media companies seem perfectly happy to profit off the masses of data they accumulate from users across the world. They are far less interested in investing in the systems and processes that ensure some semblance of accuracy or protection across their platforms.

Meta’s decision to replace independent fact-checkers with an X-style “community notes” feature may be a somewhat cynical attempt to appease the new Trump administration. Yet despite America’s current zeitgeist, tech executives must remember that their platforms still have global reach with global implications. While masquerading as a protection of “free speech,” this move will have calamitous effects on places that lie beyond America’s borders.

Of course, even before the removal of third-party fact-checkers, misinformation and disinformation on X and on Meta’s various platforms have caused untold damage. This results in social division and, all too frequently, violence. That’s because, all too often, that is what it’s designed to do.

I have experienced this first hand. In my home country of Bangladesh, in the wake our country’s revolution, we have been the victim of a concerted disinformation campaign designed to stir racial division and discredit the reputation of our country.

As documented in a BBC investigation, false reports of violence perpetrated by “Islamic radicals” have been spread by far-right, state-affiliated accounts from neighboring India. Various instances of false or misleading social media posts have been identified and debunked by the AI intelligence service Blackbird.AI. These include fake images of arson attacks at Hindu temples, shops and even houses, along with mistitled and misattributed videos of racially-driven mob beatings and killings.

In fact, this campaign has been so successful that even President Trump referenced “barbaric violence” against Hindus, Muslims and other minorities in Bangladesh (in a post he has since deleted) based on misinformation he had seen online.

This is part of a longstanding tradition in India. Indeed, the “Indian Chronicles” campaign was designed to discredit rival countries in the region and amplify pro-Indian interests.

Yet Bangladesh is not the only victim of lax content moderation protocols. Social media has been politically manipulated during political campaigns in both Brazil and Kenya. Health misinformation was allowed to run rampant across Nigeria, Indonesia and South Africa.

Economic disinformation has led to panic buying in Zimbabwe, while disinformation on Meta in Sri Lanka has led directly to violence against the Muslim community there. Indeed, one of the main motivating forces behind whistleblower Frances Haugen’s release of the “Facebook papers” was her concerns around how the company handled misinformation in the Ethiopian election.

Both misinformation and disinformation pose unique threats to the Global South. Lower levels of digital literacy, combined with rapid mobile phone adoption, can leave falsehoods harder to distinguish from information gained from credible sources.

Similarly, many Big Tech platforms simply fail to decipher misinformation through cultural and linguistic nuance. Social media fills an information vacuum left when no credible, fact-checked sources of journalism are available.

Social media is no longer simply a tool for individuals to communicate. It is being used at the state level to launch weaponized information warfare campaigns. That’s why the rollback of content moderation is a step in the wrong direction, taken at the wrong time.

We should call this what it is — digital colonialism. These companies use predatory algorithms to keep users engaged for as long as possible so that their data can be sold to the highest bidder. Despite their eye-watering profits, companies like Meta and X show little interest in protecting the users from which they profit so handsomely.

As technology advances, the stakes only get higher. The rise of both AI and deepfakes makes false information even harder to identify. In fact, researchers have already identified a “detection gap,” whereby the tools or systems used to identify fake content in the Global South often work poorly, or not at all.

Of course, AI can be a useful tool for detecting deepfakes. However, as stated by Sabhanaz Rashid Diya, founder of the Tech Global Institute, “There’s a lot more easily accessible tools and tech available that actually allows someone to create synthetic media than the ones that are available to actually detect it.”

AI has made the internet both a more productive and more dangerous place to be. Removing content moderation and fact-checking on social media platforms is the opposite of what the global online community needs. Social media executives have ignored their civic duty in favor of a set of sycophantic policy changes signaling subservience to the new administration.

The early promise of a democratized, gatekeeper-free internet has been broken by a Tech Bro class that cares only about money and power. Sadly, it will be countries like mine in the Global South that will continue to drown in the flow of unregulated social media slop. Will the Western world listen?

Ashfaq Zaman is a Southeast Asia foreign affairs expert and founder of the Dhaka Forum.

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