By Trisha Prabhu
“Have u heard about Zuckerberg’s big announcement about fact-checking?? What does it really mean?”
Hi there, and welcome back to another week of Ask Trish! I hope that all of you are having a safe, happy start to 2025. For those of you that are based in the Los Angeles area or have family in Los Angeles–my heart goes out to you. I can only imagine how difficult things are right now–what’s happening in the city is heartbreaking and devastating. Know that the Ask Trish community is with you, thinking of you, praying for you, and supporting you. For those Ask Trish readers that can, I suggest that you consider donating to support the victims of the wildfires.
With that said, thank you to this week’s question-er for the very timely, interesting question about a big piece of news from last week: indeed, last Tuesday, social media giant Meta made a very important announcement about the future of its content moderation strategy. Given Meta’s size and reach–across its family of apps, the company has nearly 4 billion users–this decision was tremendously consequential and, possibly, a sign of a broader shift in the internet safety landscape. It’s important, then, to break it down. In that spirit, this week, I’ll walk you through (1) what, exactly, Meta said in its announcement–and what it means and (2) how folks are reacting to Meta’s new content moderation strategy. As always, setting aside my own views, I’ll try to provide as neutral of a picture as possible–and let you make up your mind about where you come down on all of this.
Sound like a plan? Let’s get into it:
First and foremost, what exactly did Meta announce last Tuesday? Well, Meta actually announced several big changes to its existing content moderation strategy. First, CEO Mark Zuckerberg shared that the company would be ending its fact-checking program–which, for several years, helped to curb the spread of false information on the platform. In its place, Zuckerberg announced that Meta would institute a system quite similar to Community Notes on X, in which users can add context to or challenge posts in notes that appear next to the posts. In addition, Meta announced that it is removing automated restrictions on politically charged topics, such as gender identity, to focus its efforts on removing illegal or highly dangerous content. Practically, what does that mean? Well, per Meta’s new community guidelines, users can now characterize homosexuality as a mental illness or argue that the military and law enforcement ought to be restricted to candidates of a specific gender. And, for what Meta deems as “less serious” policy violations, users must now report an issue before the platform determines whether it ought to take action. Crucially, Meta has yet to clarify whether some types of harmful content, like eating disorder content or suicide content, fall into the “less serious” or “more serious” category. In general, then, as Meta itself put it, there will be much “more speech” on the Meta platform, with the tradeoff being that there will also be much more “bad stuff.” You might be wondering…why? Why the sudden change? It’s impossible to know, but many speculate that Mr. Zuckerberg was likely reacting to the new era of politics ahead under President-elect Donald Trump. Indeed, reporting has claimed that while Meta’s policy changes usually take months, this set of changes only took a few weeks, following Mr. Zuckerberg’s visit to President-elect Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home.
So, how are folks reacting to the news? Some are quite disappointed over the news. President Biden, for instance, has called the decision “shameful,” while many internal employees at Meta “were shocked and have openly castigated the changes on the company’s internal message boards.” But other employees have celebrated the decision, and President-elect Trump praised the decision, saying “I think they’ve come a long way — Meta, Facebook, I think they’ve come a long way…” The President-elect also said that the changes were “probably” because of comments that he had made to Mr. Zuckerberg. The question on lots of folks’ minds now–including mine–is to what extent this news ought to be thought of as a broader shift in the internet safety landscape. X was the first rollback moderation, and now Meta has it too. As Mr. Zuckerberg acknowledged in an interview with podcaster Joe Rogan last week, the “cultural pulse” taken during the 2024 presidential election did influence his thinking. The question is: will it influence other large platforms, too? We’ll just have to wait and see.
Thank you so much for reading this week’s post–I hope that you found it a valuable, informative look at this important development in the content moderation world. As we learn more about how these changes will be operationalized, I’ll be sure to bring those details to you. And in the meantime, if anything else internet-related in the news catches your eye, please let me know here. I’d love to hear about what’s on your mind–so please, take 30 seconds and fill out the form! Thank you in advance for your contribution.
Have a great week,
Trish
The opinions expressed in Ask Trish and by other contributors are those of the individual authors and do not necessarily represent the views of ConnectSafely. ConnectSafely is dedicated to fostering thoughtful discussions and exploring a broad spectrum of perspectives.