Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a major shift in the company’s approach to moderation and speech. Meta will suspend its fact-checking program and move to an X-style community notes model on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads.
Zuckerberg said in the video that Meta has “built a lot of complex systems to manage content” in recent years. “But the problem with complex systems is that they make mistakes. Even if you accidentally censor 1% of posts, that’s millions of people,” he continued. , said it was at a stage where no censorship had taken place. “There are too many mistakes and too much censorship.”
To that end, he said, “we’re going back to basics and focusing on reducing mistakes, simplifying policies, and restoring free expression on our platform.” It starts with a switch to “X-like community notes starting in the United States.”
The company plans to phase in Community Notes in the U.S. over the coming months and repeat it later this year, during which time it will remove fact checkers and end demotion of fact-checked content. Meta also obscures warning labels for certain content.
Joel Kaplan, Meta’s new chief international affairs officer (replacing Nick Clegg), said in a blog post that the company is reviewing its efforts in the community note “Approach to X. “This allows the community to decide whether more context is needed.” And people with different perspectives decide what context is useful to others. ”
Meta says it’s up to contributing users to create community notes and decide which ones to apply to posts on Facebook, Instagram, and threads. “Like X, community notes will require consensus among people with different viewpoints to prevent biased evaluations,” Kaplan wrote. “We intend to be transparent about how different perspectives impact the notes you see in the app, and we are working on the right way to share this information.”
However, the community note model was not entirely without problems for X. Research shows that community notes do not prevent misinformation from spreading. Elon Musk supports the Community Notes approach, but some of the approach has been applied to his own posts to correct falsehoods he has posted. After such incidents, Musk accused “state actors” of manipulating the system. YouTube also tested a community notes model.
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Meanwhile, Zuckerberg said he had other things to announce, including streamlining certain content policies and “eliminating a series of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that have nothing to do with mainstream discourse.” There were several. What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down voices and shut out people who think differently, but I want people to share their experiences on our platform. We want to be able to share our ideas and beliefs. ”
When asked for more information about these policy changes, Meta referred Engadget to Kaplan’s blog post.
Additionally, the filters Meta used to search for policy violations across the platform will now focus on “illegal and high severity violations.” These include terrorism, child sexual exploitation, drugs, fraud and fraud. For other less serious types of policy violations, Meta relies more on users to manually report them, but the bar for removing content is higher.
“We plan to adjust our systems to require a higher degree of reliability before content is removed,” Kaplan wrote. In some cases, multiple reviewers will consider specific content before reaching a decision whether to remove it. In addition to that, Meta is “working on ways to make account recovery easier, testing facial recognition technology, and using AI large language models to provide a second opinion on some content before taking enforcement action. LLM).
Last but not least, Meta says it is taking a more personalized approach to political content across its platforms after trying to make its platform apolitical over the past few years. states. So if you want to see more political content on your Facebook, Instagram, or Threads feed, you have the option to do so.
Donald Trump donates to his inaugural fund, replaces longtime policy chief Nick Clegg with former George W. Bush aide and appoints Trump friend (UFC CEO) Dana White to board As with what we did, it’s very hard to see these moves as anything other than meta. He is gaining favor with the next government.
Many Republicans have long accused social media platforms of censoring conservative voices. Meta itself had blocked President Trump from using his account on his platform for years after he fanned the flames of the January 6, 2021 coup attempt. “His decision to use his platform to condone, rather than condemn, the actions of his supporters at the Capitol understandably upset people in the United States and around the world,” Zuckerberg said at the time. . “We believe the risks of allowing the president to continue using our services during this period are too great.” Last year, Meta lifted restrictions on President Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts.
Zuckerberg made it clear that Trump’s election victory was part of the reason for Meta’s policy shift, calling it a “cultural tipping point” in free speech. He said the company will work with President Trump to counter other governments that are “trying to increase censorship,” including the Chinese government and some countries in Latin America.
He argued that “Europe continues to have more and more laws that institutionalize censorship, making it difficult to create innovation there.” Zuckerberg also criticized the outgoing administration (over allegations of promoting censorship) and third-party fact-checkers, saying they were “too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they built.” insisted.
These are all significant changes to Meta’s platform. On the other hand, allowing more types of audio can increase engagement without relying on garbage AI bots and the like. But the company could end up driving away many people who don’t want to deal with the kind of speech that could become more prevalent on Instagram, Facebook, and Threads now that Meta is letting go of its shackles.
“We now have an opportunity to restore freedom of expression, and I’m excited to embrace it,” Zuckerberg said. “It takes time to get this right, these are complex systems, and they will never be perfect,” he said, adding that the company still needs to work hard to remove illegal content. However, “At the end of the day, even after several years, content moderation efforts are still primarily focused on removing content, and the original idea of reducing errors, simplifying systems, and giving people a voice has changed.” It’s time to focus on getting back to it.”
Updated January 7th at 2:58pm ET: Please note that Meta has responded to our request for comment.
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