Following Elon Musk’s lead. Censorship on social media has been a major issue in recent years. During President Donald Trump’s first term, websites such as Facebook and Twitter (as they were then known) went to great lengths to “fact check” claims on their platforms and limit the reach of content they deemed misleading or dangerous.
The obvious issue, however, was that the people making the decisions about what was misleading or dangerous were a group of liberals in Silicon Valley, and the content they were censoring was frequently simply things they didn’t like or agree with politically.
The issue came to a head in October 2020, when the New York Post published a story about Hunter Biden’s laptop, which contained not only damaging photos of then-Democrat presidential nominee Joe Biden’s son using drugs and having sex with hookers, but also emails indicating that Biden was involved in his son’s overseas business dealings, which the future president had long denied.
With the laptop story breaking just a month before the 2020 presidential election, Republicans were eager to share it and demonstrate what they claimed was Joe Biden’s corruption – but they were unable to do so.
Social media platforms blocked the New York Post article from being shared, claiming that it was “Russian disinformation” or violated the site’s “hacked materials policy,” despite the fact that the material on the laptop was legally obtained when Hunter Biden abandoned it at a computer repair shop.
Then, just a few months later, after Biden was declared the winner of the 2020 election, platforms began limiting the reach of Trump’s posts claiming election interference, eventually banning him entirely following the January 6th protests at the Capitol. But it wasn’t just Trump who was banned from these social media platforms.
Several prominent conservative voices had their accounts suspended or restricted, and in March 2022, the Babylon Bee, a well-known conservative satirical site, had its account locked after tweeting a satirical article claiming that transgender US Assistant Secretary of Health Rachel Levine had been named the Babylon Bee’s Man of the Year.
Twitter informed the Babylon Bee that in order to reclaim their account, they would have to delete the joke; however, they refused to bend the knee and delete their tweet.
Following the controversy, Elon Musk contacted the Babylon Bee and eventually purchased Twitter due to his concerns about how the platform censored free speech.
Since purchasing Twitter, Elon has implemented a “Community Notes” system to replace fact-checkers, which allows users to add notes to posts and vote on whether they are helpful or necessary to the post. And it appears that Meta intends to do the same for its Facebook and Instagram platforms.
In a new video, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg (who now resembles a SoundCloud rapper from your high school, but that’s beside the point) announced several major changes to the way Facebook intends to moderate content in the future, including admitting that their “fact-checkers” were too politically biased and stating that Meta would replace fact checkers with a community notes system similar to Elon Musk’s X.
“After Trump first got elected in 2016, the legacy media wrote nonstop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy. We tried in good faith to address those concerns without becoming the arbiters of truth. But the fact-checkers have just been too politically biased, and have destroyed more trust than they have created, especially in the US.”
Along with the removal of their fact-checkers, Zuckerberg says Meta will also change their content policies, which restrict topics such as immigration and gender.
“What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas, and it’s gone too far. So I want to make sure that people can share their beliefs and experiences on our platforms.”
And they intend to change the way they use AI filters to scan content for violations, instead focusing on “illegal” and “high-severity” violations and relying on user reports before deciding whether to take action on other content that violates their policy.
Anyone who has posted on these platforms has probably encountered this issue at some point. Even at Whiskey Riff, we’ve had a lot of issues with the filters incorrectly flagging our content. I shared a meme about country music a while ago:
Overall, it appears that these are all positive changes – they’re even relocating their content moderation team from California to Texas to alleviate concerns about the appearance of bias, which I’m not sure makes a difference but at least they’re aware of – but it will all depend on how they implement these changes.
Zuckerberg summarizes by stating that he intends to collaborate with President Trump to help social media promote free speech globally, but that he hopes the platforms simplify their systems and move away from moderating political content:
“We have the opportunity to restore free expression, and I am excited to take it. It’ll take time to get this right, and these are complex systems that are never going to be perfect. There’s also a lot of illegal stuff that we still need to work very hard to remove. But the bottom line is that after years of having our content moderation work focus primarily on removing content, it is time to focus on reducing the stakes, simplifying our systems, and getting back to our roots on giving people a voice.”
