Citing a changing political and social scene and a commitment to support free speech, Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, made a number of significant changes to the company’s moderation policies and practices on Tuesday.
According to Zuckerberg, Meta will discontinue its program of fact-checking with reliable partners and switch to a community-driven mechanism like to X’s Community Notes.
According to Zuckerberg, the business is also reversing modifications that decreased the quantity of political content in user feeds and updating its content control guidelines regarding political subjects.
The changes will impact Threads as well as Facebook and Instagram, two of the biggest social media sites in the world with billions of users each.
“We’re going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies and restoring free expression on our platforms,” Zuckerbergsaid in a video. “To be more precise, this is what we intend to do. First, beginning in the United States, we will replace fact checkers with community notes that resemble X.
The company’s decision was heavily influenced by the election, Zuckerberg said, and he blamed “governments and legacy media” for supposedly wanting “to censor more and more.”
“The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards, once again, prioritizing speech,” he stated.
“So we’re gonna get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies and restoring free expression on our platforms.”
The business will continue to vigorously regulate content pertaining to drugs, terrorism, and child exploitation, he added, adding that the tools it had put in place to control its platforms were making too many mistakes.
“We built a lot of complex systems to moderate content, but the problem with complex systems is they make mistakes,” Zuckerberg stated. “Even if they accidentally censor just 1% of posts, that’s millions of people, and we’ve reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship.”
Zuckerberg stated that after the facet-checking program ends, the company will refocus its automated moderation systems on “high severity violations” and rely on user reports for other infractions. Additionally, the company will be removing some content policies pertaining to contentious topics like gender and immigration.
Additionally, Facebook plans to relocate its content moderation, safety, and trust team from California to Texas.
“We’re also going to tune our content filters to require much higher confidence before taking down content,” he stated. In actuality, there is a trade-off here. In addition to catching less malicious content, it also implies that fewer postings and accounts belonging to innocent individuals would be unintentionally removed.
Due in part to the politics of moderation decisions and initiatives, Meta and social media businesses in general have reversed their path on content moderation in recent years. It is debatable, but Republicans have long criticized Meta’s fact-checking method and fact-checking in general as being biased and favoring Democrats.
Conservatives have praised X’s Community Notes system, which CEO Elon Musk implemented to replace the company’s prior attempts regarding disinformation. It has enabled a variety of community-driven activities, including trolling and fact-checking.
Zuckerberg’s announcement coincides with CEOs and corporate executives from other industries trying to gain favor with President-elect Donald Trump’s incoming administration. In an interview with Bloomberg Television prior to the election, Zuckerberg commended Trump without explicitly endorsing him, and Meta and other internet companies contributed $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund. According to reports, Meta has named Republican Joel Kaplan to oversee its policy team ahead of Trump’s inauguration. The firm also announced on Monday that longtime Trump supporter Dana White of the UFC would join its board.
As part of the company’s announcement rollout, Kaplan made an appearance on Fox News on Tuesday morning. No news channel featured any additional Meta executives.
When Meta first introduced its fact-checking system on Facebook in 2016, it used third-party fact-checkers certified by the European Fact-Checking Standards Network and the International Fact-Checking Network to verify the content on its platforms. Over 90 organizations participated in the program, which involved fact-checking posts in over 60 languages. They have included organizations like PolitiFact and Factcheck.org in the US.
Based on how users were reacting to specific content and how quickly articles spread, Meta claimed in a news release that it could detect posts that might be spreading false information. On their own, independent fact-checkers would also try to find posts that might include false information. As they awaited assessment, posts deemed to contain false information would subsequently appear lower in feeds.
After confirming the veracity of the highlighted content, the independent fact-checkers would assign a content rating, classifying the information as either False, Altered, Partly False, Missing Context, Satire, or True and attaching notices to the posts.
These fact-checking procedures were applied to all Facebook postings, and last year they were extended to Instagram and Threads. Text-only posts, advertisements, articles, images, videos, Reels, and audio might all be reviewed by fact-checkers.
According to the system, content would be deleted if it broke the company’s community standards, which Meta itself identified, and fact-checkers were not able to do so.
Zuckerberg announced on Tuesday that the business will be making adjustments to its robust recommendation system, which determines what users see, in addition to the modifications to content moderation. Citing user complaints and conversations about how social media might influence users’ ideas, Meta has restricted political content for years.
“We’re bringing back civic content,” he stated. We stopped promoting these topics after the community requested for a while that there be less political content because it was causing tension. However, it seems like a new age has begun, and we are beginning to receive comments indicating that people would like to see this stuff once more. In order to maintain the communities’ friendliness and positivity, we will begin phasing this back into Facebook, Instagram, and Threads.”
Finally, Zuckerberg stated that Meta would collaborate with the incoming Trump administration to advance free speech globally, but he did not specify any actions to achieve this objective.
He added that other nations have clamped down on specific internet expression. “We’re going to work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world that are going after American companies and pushing to censor more,” he said.
“The only way that we can push back on this global trend is with the support of the U.S. government, and that’s why it’s been so difficult over the past four years, when even the U.S. government has pushed for censorship,” Zuckerberg said. “By going after us and other American companies, it has emboldened other governments to go even further.”
Republican MPs have been closely examining the government’s dealings with social media corporations in recent years, accusing them of censorship. In an effort to stop foreign meddling, Meta and other social media companies increased their moderating efforts after the 2016 election and met often with FBI and other government personnel. Conservative lawmakers like Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, initiated congressional investigations into the meetings as Republicans started to question government engagements with social media companies.
In 2022, Zuckerberg called the FBI a “legitimate institution” in an interview with podcaster Joe Rogan, defending the company’s dealings with the agency.
Communications between the White House and social media businesses were also scrutinized, particularly those pertaining to posts about vaccines and the Covid epidemic. Zuckerberg claimed in August that Metato was under pressure from the Biden White House to take action against some posts linked to COVID-19, and that this was incorrect.
Arguments that the government had illegally forced social media companies to remove content were dismissed by the Supreme Court in June.
However, Musk’s takeover of X (then Twitter) and his actions to significantly alter the platform’s moderation policies have made the issue even more politically potent. Although he has occasionally been involved in a feud that has included talk of a potential cage battle, Zuckerberg has previously commended Musk’s handling of X.
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