The online social media behemoth has made its announcement regarding major alterations in its content moderation policy in favor of subrogating its fact checkers through community notes, something the CEO of the company, Mark Zuckerberg, called bringing back “to its roots of free expression” as well as reducing errors bias by simplifying policies.
Moving toward community moderation
On Tuesday, Zuckerberg made the company vision announcement regarding free speech and accepting earlier mistakes handed over by him. “We’re replacing fact-checkers with Community Notes, simplifying our policies, and focusing on reducing mistakes,” he added. “Looking forward to this next chapter.”
The Community Notes feature would empower users to add context and corrections directly to posts, creating a decentralized system of content evaluation. This entire strategy is the same with what Elon Musk implemented in Twitter, now rebranded as X. Under Musk, X also launched a similar scheme allowing users to flag possibly misleading information and add context to it. Joel Kaplan, Chief Global Affairs Officer, at Meta, expressed, “We think that this could be a better way of achieving our original intention of giving people information about what they see – and one that is less subjective.”
Meta will also soon make the restrictions on content related to topics in mainstream discourse less stringent. It has also announced new enforcement priorities – illegal activities and extreme violations. In a blog with the title “More Speech and Fewer Mistakes,” Kaplan explained how this shift was much a part of an overall culture change in this new age, especially in America, where public discussions are evolving with the rise of former President Donald Trump.
Addressing bias and restoring trust
The post-Trump 2016 election fact-checking efforts at Meta were intended to curb misinformation but have been criticized for partisan bias, which Zuckerberg also acknowledged: “Fact-checkers have proven to be too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than created, particularly in the United States.”
This is understood after Zuckerberg’s recent visit to Trump at his Mar-a-Lago hotel in Florida, which might be seen as a step to embracing the former president’s calls for leniency in social media policies. Moreover, Meta is now a donor to Trump’s presidential inaugural committee, the first ever from the company.
On the contrary, the shift in policy leaves behind the past approach of Meta on content moderation, which critics claim hilt overreach. Kaplan admitted that the company’s fact-checking systems had become complicated and rife with error, resulting in user alienation. “Too much harmless content gets censored, way too many people end up wrongfully locked up in ‘Facebook jail,’ and we often are too slow to react to those occurrences,” Kaplan said.
With this in mind, Meta uses Community Notes to find a suitable balance between trusting users and open dialogue. The company believes that this decentralized model is inherently less prone to bias and will be much better equipped to deal with the challenges facing modern public discourse.
A broader cultural shift
This is of course quite a logic that is now gradually being travelled by the entire tech industry with respect to delegating the whole of content moderation. As social media is subjected to graver examination in terms of how it sways public opinion and then elections, companies such as Meta and X are coming up with an entirely different line on how to balance freedom of expression with combating the negativity of misinformation.
Zuckerberg said this change was a part of some sort of cultural tipping point. Recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point toward once again prioritizing speech: “. This shift toward Community Notes is probably the most significant movement in that direction, and it signifies a movement away from the way that this company has thought about its role in online discussions.
