Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Tuesday that there would be a wider range of speech on Facebook and other Meta platforms.
“We’re going to go back to our roots around free speech on Facebook and Instagram,” he said.
Here are some of the main changes:
No more third-party fact-checkers monitoring Facebook posts for violations in the United States. Instead, Facebook will rely on “community ratings,” a system used on X (formerly Twitter) that allows community members to flag posts and vote on their legitimacy.
Restrictions on topics such as immigration and gender identity will be lifted.
“What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to silence opinions and exclude people with different ideas, and it’s gone too far. So I want to make sure that People can share their beliefs and experiences on our platforms,” Zuckerberg said.
Civic and political content, which the company stopped presenting to users in recent years, will again be recommended on Facebook, Instagram and Threads.
And the company’s trust, safety and content moderation teams will move from California, considered a liberal state, to Texas, considered a conservative-leaning state. The move “will help us build confidence to do this work in places where there is less concern about bias among our teams,” he said.
Preparing for Trump
Zuckerberg’s announcement comes as Meta and other tech companies prepare for major policy and regulatory changes with President-elect Donald Trump’s return to the White House this month.
In his attacks on dominant technology companies, known collectively as Big Tech, Trump has been particularly critical of Meta, which suspended its account in 2021 after the January 6, 2021 riots at the United States Capitol . Its accounts were restored in 2023.
At a press conference on Tuesday, Trump was asked about Zuckerberg’s announcement.
“Honestly, I think they’ve come a long way,” he said. He said the company was “probably” responding to his threats that he planned to do something about Big Tech and censorship.
Mixed reactions
“It’s cool,” Elon Musk said of Meta’s announcement. Musk bought Twitter in 2023 and renamed it X and is a close advisor to Trump.
Linda Yaccarino, CEO of X Corp., said on a lot”.
Also on
“Social media, AI and other technology companies must resist government censorship pressure and instead work to ensure the open expression of ideas on their platforms,” Jordan said. “We hope other major tech companies, including Google, will follow the lead of X and Meta in defending free speech online.”
Kate Starbird, a professor of human-centered design and engineering at the University of Washington, said on the social media site Bluesky that Meta’s decision would hinder people’s ability to discover the truth.
“Another concern for me is that even people who WANT to find accurate information will be challenged to do so, because we will lose the groups that do this fact-checking work – unless nonprofits don’t “are stepping in to fill this gap which is going to be a huge funding gap,” she posted.
Yoel Roth, former head of Twitter’s trust and safety department, said on Bluesky that he was “genuinely baffled by the non-empirical claim that Community Notes ‘works.’ Is this the case? How does Meta know? The best available research is quite mixed on this point. »
“Too many mistakes”
In his Tuesday statement, Zuckerberg described a complex system of filters the company created to identify “legitimately bad things. Drugs, terrorism, child exploitation.”
But the systems, while well-intentioned, made mistakes, leading to erroneous censorship of posts, he said.
“We have reached a point where there are just too many errors and too much censorship,” he said.
The company will “recall” content filters that look for policy violations in an effort to “significantly reduce the degree of censorship on our platforms,” Zuckerberg said.
Joel Kaplan, Meta’s director of global affairs, said in a separate statement that “too much harmless content is censored, too many people are wrongly locked in ‘Facebook jail,’ and we are often too slow to respond when ‘they do’.
Biden ‘repeatedly pressured’
Without giving examples, Zuckerberg said in August that the U.S. government under the Biden administration had pushed for censorship. In August, Zuckerberg said in a letter to Jordan that Biden officials had “repeatedly pressured” Facebook to remove some COVID-19-related content, including humor and satire.
“By going after us and other American companies, it has emboldened other governments to go even further,” Zuckerberg said Tuesday. “But now we have the opportunity to restore free speech, and I’m excited to take it.”
USA voanews
