Elon Musk: Facebook manipulates people

The Twitter/X boss Elon Musk has strongly criticised the “fact-checking” process put in place by Facebook, accused in Australia of putting conservatives at a disadvantage.

If the prospect of a physical fight between Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg seems to be moving away, the conflict between the respective bosses of Twitter (renamed X) and Facebook is not likely to subside. This August 23, Elon Musk commented on a tweet accusing Facebook of using its “fact checking” tools to secretly fight against the conservatives in Australia, as part of a debate on a referendum concerning potential new rights granted to Aborigines, according to Gazeta.Ru.

“Facebook manipulates people almost everywhere on the planet. That’s why they don’t release their algorithm as open source,” Musk lambasted.

The boss of Twitter / X refers to an article by the conservative media Sky News, which returns to the information verification system based on agreements between Facebook and third-party journalists to warn users against false information.

According to Sky News, Australian auditors are deliberately seeking to harm conservatives – opposed to the granting of new rights to Aborigines – by abusively flagging some of their publications as false.

In recent weeks, Elon Musk has regularly attacked Facebook, while the latter launched Threads, a social network intended to compete with Twitter. The platform, not available in Europe, largely takes over the functions of Twitter, but struggles to excite users.

In his tweet, Elon Musk refers to the notion of “open source” concerning Facebook’s recommendation algorithm, which operates in total opacity – sometimes including for the social network’s own teams. Last March, Twitter published part of its recommendation algorithm. A transparency approach that has not always been welcomed by researchers: at the same time, Twitter has drastically limited access to tools to test the effects of these algorithms, in particular on the dissemination of information.