Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, has revealed plans to cut back on fact checkers across the brand’s social media platforms amid a shifting political landscape.In a video posted on Facebook, Mr Zuckerberg promised to champion free speech on social media as Donald Trump returns to the White House while replacing existing systems with something similar to community notes on Twitter/X.
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00:00Hey everyone, I want to talk about something important today because it's time to get back to our roots around free expression on Facebook and Instagram.
00:08I started building social media to give people a voice.
00:11I gave a speech at Georgetown five years ago about the importance of protecting free expression, and I still believe this today.
00:18But a lot has happened over the last several years. There's been widespread debate about potential harms from online content.
00:25Governments and legacy media have pushed to censor more and more.
00:29A lot of this is clearly political, but there's also a lot of legitimately bad stuff out there.
00:34Drugs, terrorism, child exploitation. These are things that we take very seriously, and I want to make sure that we handle responsibly.
00:41So we built a lot of complex systems to moderate content.
00:45But the problem with complex systems is they make mistakes.
00:48Even if they accidentally censor just 1% of posts, that's millions of people.
00:53And we've reached a point where it's just too many mistakes and too much censorship.
00:58The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech.
01:04So we're gonna get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes,
01:08simplifying our policies, and restoring free expression on our platforms.
01:13More specifically, here's what we're gonna do.
01:16First, we're gonna get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with community notes similar to X starting in the US.
01:23After Trump first got elected in 2016, the legacy media wrote non-stop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy.
01:31We tried in good faith to address those concerns without becoming the arbiters of truth.
01:36But the fact-checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they've created, especially in the US.
01:43So over the next couple of months, we're gonna phase in a more comprehensive community notes system.
01:50Second, we're gonna simplify our content policies and get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender
01:56that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse.
02:00What started as a movement to be more inclusive has
02:03increasingly been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas, and it's gone too far.
02:09So I want to make sure that people can share their beliefs and experiences on our platforms.
02:15Third, we're changing how we enforce our policies to reduce the mistakes that account for the vast majority of censorship on our platforms.
02:24We used to have filters that scanned for any policy violation.
02:27Now, we're gonna focus those filters on tackling illegal and high-severity violations, and for lower-severity violations,
02:34we're going to rely on someone reporting an issue before we take action.
02:39The problem is that the filters make mistakes, and they take down a lot of content that they shouldn't. So by dialing them back,
02:45we're gonna dramatically reduce the amount of censorship on our platforms.
02:50We're also going to tune our content filters to require much higher confidence before taking down content.
02:56The reality is that this is a trade-off.
02:59It means we're gonna catch less bad stuff,
03:01but we'll also reduce the number of innocent people's posts and accounts that we accidentally take down.
03:07Fourth, we're bringing back civic content. For a while, the community asked to see less politics because it was making people stressed.
03:15So we stopped recommending these posts.
03:17But it feels like we're in a new era now, and we're starting to get feedback that people want to see this content again.
03:24So we're gonna start phasing this back into Facebook, Instagram, and threads while working to keep the communities friendly and positive.
03:31Fifth, we're gonna move our trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California,
03:37and our US-based content review is gonna be based in Texas. As we work to promote free expression,
03:43I think that will help us build trust to do this work in places where there is less concern about the bias of our teams.
03:51Finally, we're gonna work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world
03:56that are going after American companies and pushing to censor more.
04:01The US has the strongest constitutional protections for free expression in the world.
04:05Europe has an ever-increasing number of laws institutionalizing censorship and making it difficult to build anything innovative there.
04:13Latin American countries have secret courts that can order companies to quietly take things down.
04:19China has censored our apps from even working in the country.
04:23The only way that we can push back on this global trend is with the support of the US government.
04:29And that's why it's been so difficult over the past four years when even the US government has pushed for censorship.
04:35By going after us and other American companies, it has emboldened other governments to go even further.
04:41But now we have the opportunity to restore free expression, and I am excited to take it.
04:47It'll take time to get this right, and these are complex systems. They're never gonna be perfect.
04:53There's also a lot of illegal stuff that we still need to work very hard to remove.
04:57But the bottom line is that after years of having our content moderation work focus primarily on removing content,
05:04it is time to focus on reducing mistakes,
05:07simplifying our systems, and getting back to our roots about giving people voice.
05:12I'm looking forward to this next chapter. Stay good out there, and more to come soon.