Meta will eliminate fact checkers, “significantly reduce the amount of censorship” and encourage more political content on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, founder Mark Zuckerberg announced.
In a video message, Zuckerberg vowed to prioritize free speech once Donald Trump returns to the White House, saying he would “remove fact checkers” from the United States and replace them with community notes like X.
Elon Musk’s social media platform X relies on other users to add warnings and context to controversial posts.
Zuckerberg said Meta’s “fact checkers were so politically biased that they destroyed more trust than they built.” He said the company’s content moderation team will move from California to Texas, where there are “less concerns about team bias.” He acknowledged that changing the way Meta filters content means “we’re going to catch less bad stuff.”
Meta has over 3 billion users worldwide. In a wide-ranging statement, Zuckerberg said Meta would “remove many restrictions on topics that have nothing to do with mainstream discussion, like immigration and gender,” and would “work with President Trump to help governments around the world.” “We will push back,” he said. They are going after American companies and trying to increase censorship. ”
He cited Europe as a place where “laws that institutionalize censorship continue to proliferate, making it difficult to build innovation,” and added that “Latin American countries have secret courts that can order companies to quietly back down.” ” he said.
Zuckerberg framed the decision to remove fact checkers as a return to arguments in favor of free expression. He studied at Georgetown University in October 2019. He said November's U.S. presidential election felt like a “cultural tipping point to re-prioritize speech.”
The announcement comes days after former British deputy prime minister Nick Clegg announced he would step down as Meta's president of international affairs and be replaced by prominent republican Joel Kaplan.
Meta's oversight board, co-chaired by figures including former Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt, responded to the announcement of a de facto crowd-sourced approach to fact-checking with the following statement: We will be working to understand the changes in more detail in the coming weeks to ensure that our new approach is as effective and easy to talk about as possible. ”
It welcomed Meta's announcement that it would review its approach to fact-checking, but added: “Decisions about content are made with maximum input from voices outside Meta, including the people who use Meta’s platform every day. It’s important.”
“I would also like to take this opportunity to thank Nick Clegg, who, as Meta's President of International Affairs, was instrumental in overseeing the establishment of the Oversight Committee and has been a strong advocate for free speech on Meta's platform. We look forward to Joel Kaplan's leadership to continue this important work. ”
Zuckerberg said in a five-minute statement: “Governments and traditional media are increasingly pushing for censorship. Much of it is clearly political, but there is also a lot of legitimately bad stuff like drugs, terrorism, and child exploitation. We take this very seriously and want to deal with it responsibly.
“So we built a lot of complex systems to manage content, and the problem with complex systems is that they make mistakes, even if they accidentally censor just 1% of the posts. Millions of people, and we've gotten to the point where it's just a matter of 'too many mistakes, too much censorship. The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point that once again prioritizes speech. ”
He said removing some restrictions on content on topics such as gender and immigration will “ensure that people can share their beliefs and experiences on our platform,” and that posts will be scanned. The focus of filters that detect policy violations will be shifted solely to addressing the problem. Meta handles illegal, high-severity violations and relies on users to report less-severe violations before taking action.
“By dialing back, we can dramatically reduce the amount of censorship on our platforms,” he said. “We also plan to tune our content filters to require more trust before removing content. In reality, this is a trade-off: not only will we discover less malicious material, but we will also This means fewer posts and accounts from innocent people will be deleted.
Source: www.theguardian.com
