The News
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Tuesday the company — which owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp — will end its fact-checking program and overhaul its policies to favor free speech over strict content moderation.
The system will be replaced by Community Notes, a method used by Elon Musk’s X that relies on users to provide context and fact-check content.
Zuckerberg said in a video announcing the change that the system had been causing “too many mistakes and too much censorship,” and that recent elections “feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech.”
Reed’s view
Zuckerberg’s blunt reversal this week puts an end to the era of corporate content moderation. Whether you view it as idealistic or sinister, content moderation has now ended as a failed experiment — even by its own terms.
In the months after the 2016 US presidential vote, when it became clear that Russia had orchestrated a social media disinformation campaign to interfere in the election, Facebook faced a deafening drumbeat of criticism.
Facing calls to beef up its defenses against “fake news,” Zuckerberg argued then that his company should not become “arbiters of truth.”
Nevertheless, he went along with an unprecedented push to vet the speech of billions of people.
It’s clear now that Zuckerberg’s first instincts were correct. And it’s time to admit that the well-meaning experiment was misguided.
Millions of people, some with crazy views and some with unorthodox or conservative ones, saw their posts censored. But the appropriate targets of moderation — false health information, foreign propaganda, bizarre conspiracy theories — flourished anyway. The ultimate result of the era of content moderation was to embolden the political right and add credibility and reach to lies and half-truths on social media.
Indeed, for all the effort and bitter controversy, half the United States came to believe Covid was a hoax and the 2020 presidential election was stolen.
On Tuesday, Zuckerberg announced he would dismantle the company’s content-vetting machine, turning over moderation to users.
The move was bashed by those on the left, who criticized Zuckerberg for kowtowing to President-elect Donald Trump, who was once banned by Facebook. Trump praised the move, and said it “probably” came as a result of his own threats.
But Zuckerberg’s critics fail to recognize the moment, just as they did in 2016. The idea that the totality of internet content could be corralled into neatly defined pens was always ludicrous.
Instead, free societies must learn to live with a certain level of, you might say, viral load flowing through online discourse. The answer, as with Covid, was always inoculation rather than elimination. Tuesday’s announcement was a step toward acceptance of that reality.
Clarification: An early version of this story said Meta would end its content moderation program. The company is ending its fact-checking program and making other changes but will still moderate content.