Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Tuesday announced a series of major changes to the company’s moderation policies and practices, citing “a changing political and social landscape” and a desire to “embrace freedom of expression.”
In a video statement, Zuckerberg indicated that Meta will end its content verification program run by third-party companies, and replace it with a community-driven system similar to the “community notes” used by Elon Musk in x.
The changes will affect Facebook and Instagram, two of the largest social networks in the world, each with billions of users, as well as Threads. “We are going back to our roots and focusing on reducing errors, simplifying our policies and restoring freedom of expression on our platforms,” Zuckerberg began in the video. «More specifically, this is what we are going to do. First, we are going to get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with community notes similar to X, starting with the United States.
He also said that the systems the company had created to moderate its platforms were making “too many mistakes” and added that Meta would continue to aggressively moderate content related to drugs, terrorism and child exploitation.
“We’ve built 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 there are too many mistakes and too much censorship,” he commented.
Controversial topics
Beyond the end of the content verification program, Zuckerberg added that the company will also eliminate some content policies around controversial topics such as immigration and gender. Additionally, the company plans to focus its automatic moderation systems on what it calls “high severity violations” and will rely on users to report other violations.
The decision, according to Zuckerberg, is influenced by the recent elections and as criticism of “governments and traditional media” that supposedly seek to “censor more and more.” «They seem like a cultural turning point towards prioritizing, once again, expression. So we will return to our roots and focus on reducing errors, simplifying our policies and restoring freedom of expression on our platforms.
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