Mark Zuckerberg promises less censorship on Facebook by removing biased third-party ‘fact checkers’

Mark Zuckerberg announced major changes to Meta’s content moderation policies and practices on Facebook and Instagram, citing his desire to promote free speech and avoid censorship. Zuckerberg’s changes begin with removing Facebook’s third-party “fact-checking” system, known for its left-wing bias.

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and Threads, is undergoing a major overhaul of its content moderation practices. CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Tuesday that the company would end its fact-checking program, rife with serious left-wing bias, and replace it with a community system similar to X’s Community Ratings. The changes come in response to what Zuckerberg sees as a “cultural tipping point” toward prioritizing speech, influenced by the recent election.

In his video, Zuckerberg says, “We’re going to return to our roots and focus on reducing errors, simplifying our policies, and restoring free speech on our platforms.” More specifically, here’s what we’re going to do. First, we will get rid of fact checkers and replace them with community ratings similar to X, starting with the United States. »

In a press release, Joel Kaplan, Meta’s director of global affairs, said: “Meta’s platforms are designed to be places where people can express themselves freely. It can be complicated. On platforms where billions of people can express themselves, all the good, the bad and the ugly are on display. But that’s freedom of speech.

Kaplan highlighted Zuckerberg’s 2019 speech at Georgetown University, in which he asserted that free speech was the engine of progress in American society and around the world. “Some people think that giving more people a voice will divide us rather than bring us together. More and more people from all walks of life believe that it is more important to achieve the policy outcomes that are important to them than to give every person a voice. I think it’s dangerous,” Zuckerberg said at the time.

Kaplan acknowledged that Meta has developed complex systems for managing content in recent years, partly in response to societal and political pressures. However, he admitted that this approach had gone too far. “As well-intentioned as these efforts are, they have expanded over time to the point where we are making too many mistakes, frustrating our users and too often hindering the freedom of expression we wish to enable. Too much harmless content is censored, too many people are wrongly locked in ‘Facebook prison’ and we are often too slow to respond when they do,” he said.

Under the new approach, Meta will eliminate some content policies around hot-button issues such as immigration and gender, and refocus its automated moderation systems on “high-severity violations.” The company will rely more on users to report further violations. Additionally, Facebook’s trust, safety, and content moderation team will move from California to Texas.

Kaplan explained the decision to end the third-party fact-checking program and move to a community notes model, similar to the one used by decide when to post messages. are potentially misleading and require more context, and people from different viewpoints decide what kind of context is useful for other users to see. We think this might be a better way to achieve our original intention of providing people with information about what they see – and a way less prone to bias,” he said.

Meta plans to gradually introduce Community Notes in the United States over the coming months and will continue to improve them throughout the year. The company will also expand its transparency reporting to regularly share figures about its errors.

Kaplan also addressed the issue of policy over-enforcement, saying, “We want to end the mission drift that has made our rules too restrictive and too prone to over-enforcement.” We are removing a number of restrictions on topics such as immigration, gender identity and gender, which are the subject of frequent political speeches and debates. It’s not fair that things can be said on television or in Congress, but not on our platforms.”

Meta will also take a more personalized approach to political content, allowing people who want to see more in their feeds to do so. “We’ll start treating civic content from the people and pages you follow on Facebook more like any other content in your feed, and we’ll start ranking and showing you that content based on explicit signals (e.g. , liking a piece of content) and implicit signals (like viewing posts) that help us predict what is meaningful to people,” Kaplan explained.

Curators will be tasked with closely monitoring Meta’s rollout of a community ratings system. When Twitter initially rolled out its system, the users selected to share comments were overwhelmingly left-leaning, resulting in community ratings that reflected an ultra-woke political ideology. The program was greatly expanded after Elon Musk purchased the platform, introducing the X Community Notes we know today.

X Community Notes is also vulnerable to mass reporting. Ahead of the 2024 election, it was revealed that the Harris campaign attempted to manipulate the program.

Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship.