A few days ago, Mark Zuckerberg announced several major changes in the operation and moderation of Meta’s platforms on the threshold of the new Trump era, which, according to the company’s communication, will support “free expression”. In practice, this means the elimination of fact-checking moderators and the relaxation of the policy on publishable content, first in the United States, and later extended to other regions.
After the announcement, criticism of the move affecting Facebook, Instagram, and Threads drew attention, among other things, to the fact that, as a result of the changes, there will be much more posts containing hate, incitement, and misinformation. The social media giant is doing all this after trying to block problematic posts for several years without success, for example, it failed to curb incitement to violence during the Capitol uprising last January.
The news has mostly been about ending the practice of fact-checking these days, but The Intercept he took turns also those new rules on moderation based on the leaked internal documents, which caused strong resentment and indignation from some of the company’s employees. On Meta’s platforms, nothing prevents users from writing offensive and dehumanizing phrases such as “immigrants are dirty shit” and that members of the LGBTQ+ community are mentally ill.
The new content moderation guidelines loosen a number of restrictions on sensitive topics such as immigration, gender identity and gender, among others. The internal training material compiled for Facebook and Instagram moderators includes the above-mentioned sentences as examples. The handbook provides moderators with an overview of the changes to the hate speech policy and guides them through the application of the new rules, which deal with topics previously labeled as sensitive rather liberally.
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In recent years, Meta has introduced several measures to curb political content, Zuckerberg himself even said in 2021 that users do not want “politics and controversy” to dominate the user experience. The company is now going against the previous efforts with the philosophy that it wants to restore the “free expression of opinion”, as if repeating the rhetoric of the previous Twitter that was adopted by Elon Musk and turned into X.
According to Zuckerberg, mainstream media and governments want to impose ever tighter censorship on social media, and fact-checkers have become too politically biased. The move comes just days after Republican Joel Kaplan replaced former UK deputy prime minister Sir Nick Clegg as Meta’s president of global affairs, giving Meta a fresh start, content moderation policy expert Kate Klonick said. drawing the lines of content moderation has always been a political issue, and setting the new rules to be more “neutral” is simply a lie.
The changes affecting the rules also worry users, which can be measured only by the fact that the number of searches related to Facebook alternatives has increased, according to Google Trends, there is more interest in decentralized social networks such as Bluesky and Mastodon.
Source: www.hwsw.hu
