Social media company Meta Platforms is positioning its business for a new conservative era under United States President-elect Donald Trump by announcing it will stop fact checking and restore free expression on its Facebook, Instagram and Threads platforms.
Meta (META.O) chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said Meta would:
- remove fact checkers and replace them with community notes
- simplify content policies and remove of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender
- change policy enforcement to reduce mistakes that account for most censorship
- restore “civic content” including politics
- move its trust and safety and content moderation teams from California to Texas, where there is less concern about the bias, to promote free expression, and
- work with Trump to “push back” on governments around the world that are increasing censorship and “going after” American companies.
“We need to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies and restoring free expression on our platforms,” Zuckerberg said in a video message.
The Facebook founder said although he believed in the importance of protecting free expression, in the last few years there had been widespread debate about the potential harm of online content and calls from governments and legacy media for more censorship.
“A lot of this is clearly political. But there’s also a lot of legitimately bad stuff out there — drugs, terrorism, child exploitation,” he said.
“So we've 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, prioritising speech.
“But the bottom line is that after years of having our content moderation work focused primarily on removing content, it's time to focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our systems, getting back to our roots and giving people voice.”
Meta Platforms (NASDAQ: META) share price closed at $US617.89, down $12.31 (1.95%), capitalising the company at $1.56 trillion (A$2.52 billion).
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