Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company, including Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, will cease using fact-checkers and instead implement “community notes similar to X.”
In a blog post entitled “More Speech and Fewer Mistakes,” written by Chief Global Affairs Officer Joel Kaplan and featuring a video message from Zuckerberg, Kaplan says, “Too much harmless content gets censored, too many people find themselves wrongly locked up in ‘Facebook jail,’ and we are often too slow to respond when they do. We want to fix that and return to that fundamental commitment to free expression.”
As for Zuckerberg, he started out his video with a similar message: “Time to get back to our roots around free expression on Facebook and Instagram.” He quickly assured listeners that the company is still dedicated to “responsibly” dealing with serious issues such as drugs, terrorism, and child exploitation, but the moderation systems in place have led to “too many mistakes and too much censorship.”
Zuckerberg went even further, claiming that the fact-checkers he introduced in the wake of the 2016 election became “too politically biased and destroyed more trust than they created.”
He also said Meta wants to get back in touch with “mainstream discourse” and stop the use of moderators and policies that “shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas.”
Of course, many will believe the shift when they see it in Meta platforms’ content. For many news accounts, especially smaller ones, “Facebook jail” has been a serious blow. Remix News knows all about this after our page was suddenly shadowbanned after earning 100 million views over the course of one year. In fact, Remix News appeared to be the most popular continental European news website — or at the very least one of the most popular continental European political news websites — on the entire platform.
Our content was earning more views and engagement than Politico, Euronews, and many other huge European English-language news websites combined. Following moderation strikes along with claims of hate speech and “spam” from politicized Facebook censors, Remix News has seen a dramatic drop in engagement, with videos barely earning more than 1,000 views now on average. We went from gaining thousands of followers a week to having lost 5,000 followers since the shadowban came into effect.
It was blanket and undeniable censorship.
Many others were also censored or banned, including Paul Joseph Watson, who recently produced a video about Zuckerberg’s “change of heart.”
Zuckerberg specifically had this to say about politics: “For a while, the community asked to see less politics because it was making people stressed, so we stopped recommending these posts, but it feels like we’re in a new era now, and we’re starting to get feedback that people want to see this content again.”
However, there are big doubts about this so-called change of heart. It was not so long ago that Zuckberg launched Threads to rival X.
“I’ve thought for a long time there should be a billion-person public conversations app that is a bit more positive,” Zuckerberg said upon the launch of Threads. Threads has been a big flop, but it was rife with the censorship seen on Facebook and the previous Twitter leadership. It is remarkably clear that Zuckerberg has only embraced free speech now after a Trump victory and all the potential consequences that come with a Trump presidency.
Is a free and open Facebook, unfettered by blatant bias and political agendas, really on the horizon? Remix News and others which have faced censorship will soon find out.
