Meta will get rid of fact-checkers, “drastically reduce the amount of censorship” and recommend more political content on its platforms, including Facebook, Instagram and Threads, founder Mark Zuckerberg has announced. announced.
In a video message, Zuckerberg promised to prioritize free speech following Donald Trump’s return to the White House and said that, starting with the United States, he would “get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with community notes similar to “X”.
X, the social media platform owned by Elon Musk, relies on other users to add warnings and context to controversial posts.
Zuckerberg said Meta’s “fact-checkers” “have simply been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they have created.” The tech company’s content moderation teams will move from California to Texas “where there is less concern about the bias of our teams,” he said. He admitted that changes to the way Meta filters content would mean “we’re going to catch less bad stuff.”
Meta has more than 3 billion users worldwide. In a wide-ranging statement, Zuckerberg said Meta would also “get rid of a bunch of restrictions on issues like immigration and gender that are simply out of touch with mainstream discourse” and “work with President Trump to roll back governments around the world. that they are going after American companies and pressuring them to censor more.”
He cited Europe as a place with “an increasing number of laws that institutionalize censorship and make it difficult to build anything innovative” and said: “Latin American countries have secret courts that can order companies to quietly remove things.”
Zuckerberg framed the decision to get rid of fact-checkers as a return to a free speech argument that he did it at Georgetown University in October 2019. He said the US presidential election in November felt like “a cultural turning point toward, once again, prioritizing speech.”
The announcement comes days after Nick Clegg, former deputy prime minister of the United Kingdom, announced that he would step down as Meta’s global affairs chair to be replaced by prominent Republican Joel Kaplan.
Meta’s oversight board, co-chaired by figures including Denmark’s former prime minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt, responded to the announcement of what is effectively a crowd-sourced fact-checking approach with a statement saying: “We look forward to working with Aim for the next few weeks to understand the changes in greater detail, ensuring your new approach can be as effective and speech-friendly as possible.”
He welcomed the announcement that Meta would review its fact-checking approach, but said: “It is essential that decisions about content are made with maximum input from voices outside Meta, including the people who use its platforms every day. “.
It concluded: “We would also like to take this opportunity to thank Nick Clegg who, as president of global affairs at Meta, was instrumental in overseeing the creation of the oversight board and has been a strong supporter of freedom of expression on Meta platforms. “We look forward to Joel Kaplan’s leadership in continuing this important work.”
In his five-minute statement, Zuckerberg said: “Governments and traditional media have pushed for more and more censorship. A lot of this is clearly political, but there’s also a lot of legitimately bad stuff out there: drugs, terrorism, child exploitation. These are things we take very seriously and I want to make sure we handle them responsibly.
“So we build a lot of complex systems to moderate content, but the problem with complex systems is that they make mistakes, even if they accidentally censor just 1% of posts, that’s millions of people, and we’ve reached a point where “which is just Too many mistakes and too much censorship. The recent elections also seem like a cultural turning point towards, once again, prioritizing expression.”
He said removing some restrictions on content on topics such as gender and immigration would “ensure people can share their beliefs and experiences on our platforms” and said the focus of filters that scan posts for policy violations would be changed to address only illegal, high-severity violations with Meta, relying on users to report lower-severity violations before taking action.
“By reducing them, we will dramatically reduce the amount of censorship on our platforms,” he said. “We are also adjusting our content filters to require much greater confidence before removing content. The reality is that it is a compensation. It means we’re going to catch less bad stuff, but we’re also going to reduce innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally delete.”