Meta Platforms' chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, on Tuesday announced a decision to do away with the company's long-standing fact-checking process.
Meta Platforms is the parent company of the social network Facebook, the popular photo- and video-sharing network Instagram, and the instant messaging services WhatsApp and Messenger.
In a video posted on his Instagram account, Zuckerberg labelled the move as “time to get back to our roots of free expression on Facebook and Instagram”.
“I started building social media to give people a voice… I still believe this today. 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. We’ve now reached a point where it’s too many mistakes and too much censorship,” Zuckerberg said in his statement via Instagram.
To revert the censorship, Meta is “getting rid of fact-checkers and replacing them with Community Notes”, a format where the users of a platform themselves flag content that could have misinformation. The new system will start rolling out over the next two months in the US, and be expanded in the next year.
As part of this implementation, Meta’s apps will henceforth check for the harmfulness of a piece of content mostly if it is reported by its users—and not by default, barring exceptions such as terrorism.
“The recent elections feel like a cultural tipping point towards prioritising speech. So, we’re going back to our roots, simplifying our policies, and restoring free expression on our platforms,” Zuckerberg said.
The Meta Platforms founder and chief executive has vocally supported incoming US president Donald Trump and also donated $1 million on behalf of the company towards his upcoming inauguration. Zuckerberg’s approach towards the incoming government is in stark contrast to the end of Trump’s first term of presidency, which ended with him being banned across all Meta platforms.
Zuckerberg’s other moves include backing the incoming Trump administration to influence global governments which he said has made it difficult for “American companies to innovate”. While he called out the European Union, Latin America, and China, it isn’t clear if India’s standing policies on misinformation, hate speech, and others on social media platforms would be affected, too.
The policy shift can considerably affect how Big Tech platforms work around the world, as well as the operating business models of third-party fact-checkers, such as Alt News and Boom Live in India.
Zuckerberg, meanwhile, insisted that fact-checkers themselves were being ‘politically biased’, thus going against the ethos of social media.
“After Trump got elected in 2016, the legacy media wrote nonstop on how misinformation was a threat to democracy. We tried in good faith to address those concerns without becoming the arbiters of truth. But, fact-checkers have been too politically biased, and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created… we’ll also simplify our content policies to remove restrictions on topics such as immigration and gender, that are out of touch with the mainstream discourse,” he said.
“What started as a movement to be more inclusive has turned into a medium to shut out people and their opinions—and it’s gone too far,” he claimed.
Zuckerberg also said that over-reliance on automated rule-based policy filters has added to “mistakes” on Meta’s platforms, and while he admitted that going forward the company’s platforms would fail to filter out “more bad stuff”, such a move can “reduce the number of innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally take down”.
The decision comes as Trump is set to officially assume duties from outgoing US president Joe Biden. Trump was at the receiving end of Meta’s fact-checking and content moderation efforts towards the end of his first term as US president—being blocked after allegedly inciting his supporters to storm the seat of the US government in a speech on 6 January 2021.
Joel Kaplan, chief global affairs officer at Meta, added in a blog post, “We have been over-enforcing our rules, limiting legitimate political debate and censoring too much trivial content and subjecting too many people to frustrating enforcement actions.”
Meta will also reintroduce “political content” on the content feed of users, which Zuckerberg said is in demand right now—while keeping his platforms “friendly and positive”.
Mishi Choudhary, general counsel at data privacy firm Virtru and founder of Software Freedom Law Centre, said that the move “is a sign of repositioning of Meta for the upcoming administration.“
“Meta has always censored (content) in countries like India while tooting the horn of free speech in Western democracies. They are nothing but data-hungry—companies that are no different from others,” she added.
(By arrangement with livemint.com)
