Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced sweeping changes to the company’s approach to content moderation. After years of developing ‘trust and safety’ and content moderation systems and policies, Zuckerberg now asserts that “we’ve reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship.” Zuckerberg has decided to return to a posture that he believes will prioritize free expression.
Specific policy changes announced include:
- Eliminating fact-checkers in the US and replacing them with a “community notes” system similar to X (formerly Twitter);
- “Simplifying” content policies by removing certain restrictions on topics like immigration and gender;
- Changing enforcement approach for policy violations:
- Focusing automated filters only on illegal and high-severity violations;
- Requiring user reports before taking action on lower-severity violations;
- Increasing the confidence threshold required before removing content;
- Reintroducing civic and political content into recommendation systems on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads;
- Relocating trust and safety and content moderation teams from California to Texas. “This will help remove the concern that biased employees are overly censoring content,” Zuckerberg wrote on Threads.
Zuckerberg says he is planning to work with President-elect Donald Trump to oppose global “censorship” pressures. He makes claims about such pressures mounting in multiple regions, including:
- Europe’s “ever-increasing number of laws, institutionalizing censorship”;
- Secret courts in Latin America that “that can order companies to quietly take things down”;
- Chinese censorship.
He further claims that the only way Meta “can push back on this global trend is with the support of the US government, and that’s why it’s been so difficult over the past four years when even the US government has pushed for censorship.”
Zuckerberg’s statement was timed with the release of a post by Meta Chief Global Affairs Officer Joel Kaplan:
We want to undo the mission creep that has made our rules too restrictive and too prone to over-enforcement. We’re getting rid of a number of restrictions on topics like immigration, gender identity and gender that are the subject of frequent political discourse and debate. It’s not right that things can be said on TV or the floor of Congress, but not on our platforms.
Notably, Kaplan says the company is now deploying “AI large language models (LLMs) to provide a second opinion on some content before we take enforcement actions.”
Timed with the announcement, Kaplan also provided an “exclusive” interview with the Fox News morning program “Fox & Friends.”