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by AUSTIN DENEAN | The National News Desk
WASHINGTON (TNND) — Facebook and Instagram’s parent company is planning to scale back its content moderation policies after admitting its error rates can be “too high” and restrict free speech on the platforms.
Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, said in a blog post that it would look to apply its content moderation policies more fairly moving forward, which comes as social media is under higher scrutiny in the incoming Trump administration over alleged bias toward conservative viewpoints that amount to censorship of users.
“We know that when enforcing our policies, our error rates are too high, which gets in the way of the free expression we set out to enable. Too often harmless content gets taken down or restricted and too many people get penalized unfairly,” Meta president of global affairs Nick Klegg wrote in a blog post on Tuesday.
Klegg said that finding the balance between keeping people safe and having their voices heard is something “no platform will ever get right 100 percent of the time,” highlighting the challenge that faces major social media platforms that have to sort through millions of posts across the world on a daily basis.
Companies rely on technology and human moderators to sort through the seemingly endless content that is posted on their platforms that also has come under a more focused microscope since the 2020 election and coronavirus pandemic that thrust content moderation into the political spotlight.
“It is genuinely hard, as a formal task, to get classifier algorithms to identify true positives and not false positives. In other words, content that doesn't violate Terms of Service or the community guidelines,” said John Wihbey, an associate professor of media innovation at Northeastern University.
Republicans have accused Big Tech of censoring conservative views, while Democrats have criticized platforms for not going far enough to deal with misinformation and fake news that can proliferate online. The political juxtaposition essentially creates a no-win scenario for Big Tech to operate under when it comes to dealing with congressional oversight as any changes to moderation policies are met with resistance from either side of the aisle.
Claims of conservative censorship have stoked the creation of multiple right-leaning social media sites, including President-elect Donald Trump’s Truth Social, and have been a frequent subject of discussion with Elon Musk’s purchase of X, formerly known as Twitter.
Musk has made drastic cuts to X’s content moderation teams and drastically shifted the platforms policies when it comes to misinformation and hate speech. He frequently touts the platform as a pillar of free speech and points to its community notes feature, where users can add context to posts, as evidence of fairer moderation policies.
But researchers have also found a surge in misinformation and hate speech on X since Musk too over the company that prompted many advertisers to flee what was once one of the most popular social media websites.
How to deal with misleading or harmful posts has been a longstanding problem for social media networks but the issue intensified during 2020, when the coronavirus pandemic unleashed a wave of posts questioning medical guidance and the aftermath of the election between Trump and now-President Joe Biden brought on unfounded claims of election fraud.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said he regrets how his company handled its moderation of COVID content, particularly requests from the Biden administration to take posts down. In a letter to the House Judiciary Committee in August, Zuckerberg said he regretted not being more outspoken about “government pressure” to censor COVID-related posts.
"In 2021, senior officials from the Biden administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree,” Zuckerberg wrote. “I believe the pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it.”
The Meta CEO also recently went to Mar-a-Lago to meet with Trump as companies try to prepare themselves for a new administration to come into office. Trump has a history of targeting Meta and has claimed that its platforms are biased against him.
In the aftermath of 2020, Meta decided to minimize the reach of political content on Instagram and Threads during the 2024 cycle in a move that was made at least in part to avoid some of the headaches that come with policing the content its users post. Meta has said that its users have told them that they do not want politics in their feed and the problems that come along with it are not worth the user engagement.
Dialing back its moderation policies are another step in trying to navigate itself out of the political spotlight Big Tech is certain to be under with Republican congressional majorities and new Federal Communications Commission Brendan Carr, who has promised to go after “censorship” from Big Tech.
“I'm sure it's influenced by political consideration. It is an attempt to probably get the company well-situated for a new era of scrutiny around content moderation,” Wihbey said. “But there may be real reasons for doing what they're doing. There’s a lot of smart people there, undoubtedly, they're bringing a whole bunch of examples into the room, and looking at these and saying, ‘Look, our current practices are having too many false positives, and we need to revise the policy.’”
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