Zuckerberg released a statement in which he said that he wants to replace the professional fact-checkers on his platforms in the US with community notes. So I took a transcript of his statement and added community notes, where i saw fit.
„Hey 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. I started building social media to give people a voice.
👥 Readers added context
Before Facebook Zuckerberg started a site called “Facemash”. Facemash was a website designed to evaluate the attractiveness of female Harvard students. The students were unaware their images were being used for this rating. The site used ID photos of female undergraduates taken without permission from the university’s online directories. Users were presented with pairs of women and asked to rank who was „hotter.“ The homepage stated, “Were we admitted for our looks? No. Will we be judged by them? Yes.
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I gave a speech at Georgetown five years ago about the importance of protecting free expression, and I still believe this today, but a lot has happened over the last several years.
There’s been widespread debate about the potential harms from online content.
👥 Readers added context
Meta itself conducted extensive internal research on the effects of Instagram on teens, particularly focusing on mental health and well-being. The research, which was not initially made public, revealed several concerning findings:
- Suicidal Thoughts: Among teens who reported suicidal thoughts, 13% of UK users and 6% of US users traced these impulses back to Instagram 1.
- Body Image Issues: 32% of teen girls reported that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse 2. One internal presentation slide stated, „We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls“3.
- Mental Health Impact: The research showed that Instagram use was associated with increased rates of anxiety and depression among teens 4. Teenagers themselves blamed Instagram for these increases 5.
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Governments and legacy media have pushed to censor more and more. A lot of this is clearly political, but there’s also a lot of legitimately bad stuff out there.
👥 Readers added context
The term „legacy media“ carries significant political connotations, often used in a critical or derogatory context.
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Drugs, terrorism, child exploitation. These are things that we take very seriously, and I want to make sure that we handle responsibly. So 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. The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards, once again, prioritizing speech. So, we’re going to 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.
👥 Readers added context
Facebook has been implicated in fueling ethnic violence and contributing to genocidal campaigns in multiple countries, most notably in Myanmar against the Rohingya people 6. The platform’s algorithms and content moderation practices have been criticized for amplifying hate speech and inciting violence against vulnerable groups 7.
In 2017, Facebook played a significant role in the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar’s Rakhine state 8. The platform’s algorithms intensified anti-Rohingya content, contributing to real-world violence 9. Facebook’s systems proactively amplified and promoted content that incited violent hatred against the Rohingya, beginning as early as 2012 10.
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First, we’re going to get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with community notes similar to X starting in the US.
👥 Readers added context
Known Limitations of the current community notes on X: A study found that 68.8% of tweets containing misinformation had no visible moderation action, including Community Notes 11.
The system requires agreement from users with different perspectives, which can be difficult to achieve for politically charged topics 12.
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After Trump first got elected in 2016, the legacy media wrote nonstop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy. We tried in good faith to address those concerns without becoming the arbiters of truth, but the fact-checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created, especially in the US.
👥 Readers added context
Some studies have found that fact-checkers tend to select more statements from Republican politicians to check compared to Democrats 13. However, this doesn’t necessarily indicate ideological bias, as it could be due to other factors such as the volume or nature of claims made by different politicians.
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So, over the next couple of months, we’re going to phase in a more comprehensive community notes system.
Second, we’re going to simplify our content policies and get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse. What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas, and it’s gone too far. So, I want to make sure that people can share their beliefs and experiences on our platforms.
👥 Readers added context
Since Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter (now rebranded as X) in October 2022, there has been a significant increase in hate speech and potentially hate-crime-related content on the platform. Multiple studies and reports have documented this trend:
Slurs against transgender individuals rose by 62% 14.
The Center for Countering Digital Hate reported that the daily use of racial slurs increased dramatically:
Use of the N-word tripled compared to the 2022 average 15. Slurs against gay men increased by 58% 16.
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Third, we’re changing how we enforce our policies to reduce the mistakes that account for the vast majority of censorship on our platforms. We used to have filters that scanned for any policy violation. Now, we’re going to focus those filters on tackling illegal and high-severity violations, and for lower-severity violations, we’re going to rely on someone reporting an issue before we take action.
👥 Readers added context
Facebook’s response to user reports can be inconsistent and often slow. While the platform aims to review reported content within 24 to 48 hours, many reports go unaddressed for longer periods or are not reviewed at all 17. This delay can lead to the continued presence of harmful content on the platform.
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The problem is that the filters make mistakes, and they take down a lot of content that they shouldn’t. So, by dialing them back, we’re going to dramatically reduce the amount of censorship on our platforms. We’re also going to tune our content filters to require much higher confidence before taking down content. 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.
Fourth, we’re bringing back civic content. For a while, the community asked to see less politics because it was making people stressed, so we stopped recommending these posts, but 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. So we’re going to start phasing this back into Facebook, Instagram, and Threads while working to keep the communities friendly and positive.
👥 Readers added context
Meta’s broad and vague definition of political content has already raised concerns. The company describes it as content „likely to mention governments, elections, or social topics that affect a group of people and/or society at large“ 18. This ambiguity could lead to the suppression of a wide range of topics, including important social issues.
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Fifth, we’re going to move our trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California, and our US-based content review is going to be based in Texas. As we work to promote free expression, I think that will help us build trust to do this work in places where there is less concern about the bias of our teams.
Finally, we’re going to work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world. They’re going after American companies and pushing to censor more.
👥 Readers added context
Facebook’s content moderation capabilities are significantly weaker for non-English languages and regions 19.
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The US has the strongest constitutional protections for free expression in the world. Europe has an ever-increasing number of laws, institutionalizing censorship, and making it difficult to build anything innovative there.
👥 Readers added context
The European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA) has requires large online platforms to:
– Swiftly remove „illegal content“ and „hate speech“20
– Report regularly to EU authorities on steps taken to reduce „problematic“ information.21
– Implement restrictions on „disinformation“22
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Latin American countries have secret courts that can order companies to quietly take things down. China has censored our apps from even working in the country. The only way that we 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.
By going after us and other American companies, it has emboldened other governments to go even further. But now we have the opportunity to restore free expression, and I’m excited to take it.
👥 Readers added context
Trump threatened to send Zuckerberg to prison for life. In his book, Trump wrote, „We are watching him closely, and if he does anything illegal this time he will spend the rest of his life in prison.“23
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It’ll take time to get this right, and these are complex systems. They’re never going to be perfect. There’s also a lot of illegal stuff that we still need to work very hard to remove. But the bottom line is that after years of having our content moderation work focused primarily on removing content, it is time to focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our systems, and getting back to our roots about giving people voice. I’m looking forward to this next chapter. Stay good out there, and more to come soon.„
👥 Readers added context
Facebook still fails to fully review all content flagged by users as potentially violating its rules, even three years after shifting towards increased reliance on automated systems 24.
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I have been regularly writing about social media and the broader development of the media landscape for the last 17 years, primarily in German. If you can read German, you can subscribe to streamletter fore free.
