Mark Zuckerberg has announced a raft of changes coming to Facebook that he claims will solve ‘many mistakes and too much censorship’ currently seen on the social media platform
Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg has announced changes to his social media platforms – but how will they affect your feed?
The Meta CEO, 40, said he hopes to encourage ‘free speech’ as he shared his desire to get back to basics with a ‘return to their roots’. The change will see a shift in the way the company, which owns Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, moderates users’ posts, putting an end to content accidentally being censored.
In an online video, Zuckerburg touched on the political landscape as he declared they’re set to replace its fact-checking program with trusted partners for a community-driven system – similar to X, formerly Twitter, which is run by billionaire Elon Musk.
However, the change in recent times on X, along with Musk’s White House appointment following President-Elect Donald Trump’s re-election, has seen loyal account users exit the platform in droves.
The mass exodus, which saw the site lose around 2.7 million active Apple and Android users in the US in just two months at the end of last year, has been blamed on people’s feeds being taken over by harmful and inappropriate content, with radical views easily cutting through.
Bruce Daisley, a former vice president of the company in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa when it was still known as Twitter, told the Guardian that X has become a place where people no longer want to be. “If I went out to a Christmas market, and if in the corner of this Christmas market there was a group of racist protesters, I probably wouldn’t stay there,” Daisley said.
He also argued that contrasting opinions have always had a place on the platform, as long as they didn’t support violent or discriminatory beliefs. Under Musk’s ownership, however, the former senior social media figure believes those with extreme views have been given too much exposure and leeway.
Facebook’s new regulation system could be very similar to Community Notes on X. The founder explained that the changes will also be mirrored on Instagram and Threads.
Zuckerberg explained: “We’re gonna get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies and restoring free expression on our platforms. More specifically, here’s what we’re going to do. First, we’re going to get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with community notes similar to X, starting in the US.”
Fact-checkers that were introduced amid Trump’s 2016 election have become “too politically biased” and have destroyed “more trust than they’ve created,” particularly in the United States, Zuckerberg said.
He added: “The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards, once again, prioritising speech. So we’re gonna get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies and restoring free expression on our platforms.”
Meta is also moving its trust and safety teams responsible for content policies and moderation from California to Texas. “We’ve seen this approach work on X – where they empower their community to decide when posts are potentially misleading and need more context, and people across a diverse range of perspectives decide what sort of context is helpful for other users to see,” the firm said.
“We think this could be a better way of achieving our original intention of providing people with information about what they’re seeing – and one that’s less prone to bias.” Meta will also be scrapping a number of current restrictions around topics like immigration and gender identity. It said political content will be phased back into feeds with a “more personalized approach”.
The firm will still use automated moderation systems, but these will now only focus on more serious content violations such as terrorism, child sexual exploitation, and drugs.
Zuckerberg further explained: “We built a lot of complex systems to moderate content, but the problem with complex systems is they make mistakes. Even if they accidentally censor just 1% of posts, that’s millions of people, and we’ve reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship.”
He believes the move will restore “innocent” posts from members of the public who enjoy using the platform. “We’re also going to tune our content filters to require much higher confidence before taking down content,” he said. “The reality is that this is a trade off. It means we’re going to catch less bad stuff, but we’ll also reduce the number of innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally take down.”
Meanwhile Joel Kaplan, chief global affairs officer, said in a blog post that they will lift restrictions “on some topics that are part of mainstream discourse” and will focus the company’s “enforcement on illegal and high-severity violations.”