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Meta to get rid of factcheckers and recommend more political content

Mark Zuckerberg says company will ‘dramatically reduce censorship’ across Facebook, Instagram and Threads

Mark Zuckerberg promised to prioritise free speech following the return of Donald Trump to the White House. Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images

Mark Zuckerberg promised to prioritise free speech following the return of Donald Trump to the White House. Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images

Meta will get rid of factcheckers, “dramatically reduce the amount of censorship” and recommend more political content on its platforms, including Facebook, Instagram and Threads, founder Mark Zuckerberg has announced.

In a video message, Zuckerberg vowed to prioritise free speech after the return of Donald Trump to the White House and said that, starting in the US, he would “get rid of factcheckers and replace them with community notes similar to X”.

X, the social media platform owned by Elon Musk, relies on other users to add caveats and context to contentious posts.

Zuckerberg said Meta’s “factcheckers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created”. The tech firm’s content moderation teams will be moved 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 globally. In a wide-ranging statement, Zuckerberg said Meta would also “get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse” and “work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world that are going after American companies and pushing to censor more”.

He cited Europe as a place with “an everincreasing number of laws institutionalising censorship and making it difficult to build anything innovative” and said: “Latin American countries have secret courts that can order companies to quietly take things down.”

Zuckerberg framed the decision to get rid of factcheckers as a return to an argument in favour of freedom of expression that he made at Georgetown University in October 2019. He said November’s US presidential election felt like “a cultural tipping point towards, once again, prioritising speech”.

The announcement comes days after Nick Clegg, the former UK deputy prime minister, announced he was stepping down as Meta’s president of global affairs to be replaced by the prominent Republican Joel Kaplan.

Meta’s oversight board, co-chaired by figures including the former prime minister of Denmark Helle Thorning-Schmidt, responded to the announcement of what is effectively a crowd-sourced approach to factchecking with a statement that said: “We look forward to working with Meta in the coming weeks to understand the changes in greater detail, ensuring its new approach can be as effective and speech-friendly as possible.”

Zuckerberg framed the decision to get rid of factcheckers as a return to an argument in favour of freedom of expression that he made at Georgetown University in October 2019. He said November’s US presidential election felt like “a cultural tipping point 

The announcement comes days after Nick Clegg, the former UK deputy prime minister, announced he was stepping down as Meta’s president of global affairs to be replaced by the prominent Republican Joel Kaplan.

Meta’s oversight board, co-chaired by figures including the former prime minister of Denmark Helle Thorning-Schmidt, responded to the announcement of what is effectively a crowd-sourced approach to factchecking with a statement that said: “We look forward

It welcomed the announcement that Meta would revise its approach to factchecking, but said: “It is essential that decisions on content are taken with maximum input from voices outside of Meta, including of 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 advocate for freedom of speech on Meta’s platforms. We look forward to Joel Kaplan’s leadership in continuing this important work.”

In his five-minute statement, Zuckerberg said: “Governments and legacy media have pushed to censor more and more. 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 that we take very seriously, and I want to make sure that we handle responsibly.

“So we built a lot of complex systems to moderate content, but the problem with complex systems is they make mistakes, 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. The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards, once again, prioritising speech.”

He said that removing some restrictions on content on topics such as gender and immigration would “make sure that people can share their beliefs and experiences on our platforms” and he said the focus of filters that scan posts for policy violations would be shifted to only tackling illegal and high severity violations with Meta, relying on users to report lower severity violations before it takes action.

“By dialling them back, we’re going to dramatically reduce the amount of censorship on our platforms,” he said. “We’re also going to tune our content filters to require much higher confidence before taking down content. The reality is that this is a tradeoff. It means we’re going to catch less bad stuff, but we’ll also reduce innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally take down.”

Author: Robert Booth Technology editor

Source: The Guardian

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