Zuck takes a page from Musk: Meta dumps fact-checkers, loosens speech restrictions

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced a whole bunch of changes designed to “get back to our roots around free expression” that, among other things, include ditching fact-checking moderators, and loosening content policies to allow previously restricted speech to proliferate.

The Instagram supremo gave a quick rundown of the changes in a series of posts on Threads this morning, and a video saying much the same embedded in a blog post outlining plans by the corporation’s new chief global affairs officer Joel Kaplan.

TL;DR? Expect your Facebook feed to start looking a lot more like X, the site better known as Twitter, including the return of political content that was previously down-ranked in an attempt to keep the platform civil. Meta, which has billions of users worldwide, now intends to bring back the political argy-bargy, which it calls “civic content.”

“In recent years we’ve developed increasingly complex systems to manage content across our platforms, partly in response to societal and political pressure to moderate content,” Kaplan said. “This approach has gone too far.”

And thus, Meta has outlined a series of adjustments it plans to make, such as ending its third-party fact-checking program in favor of a community notes system like the one on Elon Musk’s X, which Kaplan said has worked well for that site.

Rather than have an outside panel of journalists and expert moderators weigh up whether people’s posts should be labeled or hidden away as hoaxes, false, or misleading, instead a more crowdsourced-based approach to labeling will be taken, we’re told.

“Fact checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created, especially in the US,” Zuckerberg said in his video discussing the about-face changes. “What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas.”

Fact checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created

Kaplan and Zuckerberg both cited the complexity of Meta’s content moderation system as a key issue, and to simplify its policies, the social media giant plans to loosen restrictions on permissible speech in an effort to reduce the amount of griping about moderation.

“The problem with complex systems is that they make mistakes,” Zuckerberg said. “Even if they accidentally censor just one percent of posts, that’s millions of people.”

What that means in practice is that Meta intends to get rid of restrictions on some sensitive topics “like immigration, gender identity and gender,” Kaplan said. “It’s not right that things can be said on TV or the floor of Congress, but not on our platforms.”

It’s not clear what all categories are going to have restrictions lifted – we asked, and Meta had no answer – but the biz plans to adjust automated content filters to focus only on illegal and severe policy violations. According to Meta, that means terrorism, child sexual exploitation, drugs, fraud, and scams. For less severe violations, Meta won’t be taking any action unless someone reports it.

If that sounds like a recipe for hate speech and objectionable posts to slip through the cracks and make it into your feed, that’d be accurate – Zuckerberg essentially admitted as much.

YouTube loves recommending conservative vids
WAIT, HUH?

“We’re going to catch less bad stuff,” the Meta man said, “but we’ll also reduce the number of innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally take down.”

Whether or not Meta will actually respond to reports is up for debate, as Zuckerberg announced changes coming to its trust and safety and content moderation teams that enforce policies and review content, too: They’re being shipped out of California to “help remove the concern that biased employees are overly censoring content.”

Where are they headed, you may ask? Texas. “It will help us build trust to do this work in places where there’s less concern about the bias of our teams,” Zuckerberg said.

However, it’s likely to spark fresh questions about potential bias in the opposite direction.

Zuck goes MAGA to save his own skin
Hiring former George W. Bush deputy chief of staff for policy Joel Kaplan to head up global affairs and appointing Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO and Trump ally Dana White to the Meta board makes it seem an awful lot like Zuck is trying to curry favor with the incoming US President.

It’s pretty obvious Zuckerberg is doing everything possible to avoid a clash with the incoming administration.

Meta’s adoption of a more Musk-like approach to speech moderation may hit the spot, as does Zuck’s pledge to work with Trump “to push back against foreign governments going after American companies to censor more.”

Zuckerberg took time to call out supposedly oppressive censorship regimes in Europe, where there’s “an ever-increasing number of laws institutionalizing censorship and making it difficult to build anything innovative,” in Latin America, where he says there are “secret courts that can order companies to quietly take things down,” and in China, which has “censored our apps from even working.”

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Never mind Meta’s reported attempt to get rid of competition from Chinese social media apps in the US, of course.

For added brownie points, Zuck also called out the Biden administration, which he complained “has pushed for censorship” over the past four years. It’s worth pointing out Meta has been in the FTC’s cross-hairs on various occasions over the past four years, which could also be behind some of that ill-will from Mark. But it is fair to say the Democrat White House leaned on Facebook to moderate and hide away speech it didn’t feel was helpful during the COVID-19 pandemic.

It’s true, social media moderators do go after conservatives
BUT…

The bottom line is, Meta would have suffered under Trump had it continued with business as usual. President-elect Trump famously threatened to send Zuckerberg to prison over the summer if he was reelected, and has for years talked trash in Zuck’s general direction.

The incoming president’s dislike of Zuckerberg was only made worse when Facebook banned Trump in 2021 for using Facebook “to incite violent insurrection against a democratically elected government.” Trump even flipped last year from supporting a ban on TikTok to opposing it so as not to hand a win to Zuckerberg or Meta, which he described as “a true Enemy of the People.”

And don’t forget that likely incoming FCC boss Brendan Carr railed against [PDF] social networks’ fact checkers in November, so the writing was on the wall in that respect, too.

Given all that, it’s no surprise Zuck wants to mend fences with Trump – dining with the Republican at Mar-a-Lago and confessing he over-did the content moderation – before the Donald gains the power to make life much harder for Meta.

Just don’t be shocked if the discourse on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads starts resembling the chaos that Musk’s similar moderation approach sparked at Twitter. ®