Just a few days after the incorporation of Joel Kaplan, who was an advisor to former US President George W. Bush and close to the circle of the next president, Donald Trump, to Meta, Mark Zuckerberg’s social network has made a controversial decision: to end the data verification program. The social network giant will stop using content checkers and, like its competitor X, will delegate to users the incorporation of notes or corrections to publications. Kaplan replaced Nick Clegg, former British deputy prime minister, as head of global affairs four days ago, to facilitate rapprochement with Trump.
Kaplan has published the reasons for the decision on the Facebook blog: “In recent years, we have developed increasingly complex systems to manage content on our platforms, partly in response to social and political pressure to moderate it. This approach has gone too far. As well-intentioned as many of these efforts have been, they have expanded over time to the point where we are making too many mistakes, frustrating our users, and too often standing in the way of the free speech we we set out to allow. “Too much harmless content is censored, too many people are unfairly locked up in “Facebook jail,” and we are often too slow to respond when they do.”
In this way, Meta aligns with the model of Donald Trump and his recently appointed head of the Department of Government Efficiency, Elon Musk, owner of Tesla and X, where the magnate suppressed moderation after acquiring the social network.
Kaplan appeals to freedom of expression to justify the measure. “On platforms where billions of people can have a voice, everything good, bad and ugly is on display. But that is freedom of expression.”
With that premise, Meta has announced the end of the third-party data verification program, active since 2016, and the move to community notes.
The program was based on the incorporation of independent fact-checking organizations to complete or clarify or label and limit the information published on the social network. “Over time, we end up with too much verified content. A program intended to inform, too often, became a tool to censor,” he says.
This independent verification will be replaced by a system similar to that of X, which in practice means abandoning content moderation. The new model is called Community Notes, which delegates the rating of the messages to the users and will require a specific agreement between them for their decision to be effective on the messages.
Starting today, the platform to be part of the notes community is open on Facebook, Instagram and Threads, which will begin in the United States these months and expand to the rest of the countries.
In this way, the system that has allowed the elimination of millions of publications (1% of the content, according to Meta) disappears with the argument that “it has been applied excessively, limiting legitimate political debate and censoring too much trivial content.”
Thematically, the measure will affect very sensitive content where hoaxes and misinformation are harvested daily. “We are getting rid of a series of restrictions on issues such as immigration, sexual identity and gender that are the subject of frequent political speeches and debates. It is not fair that things can be said on television or in Congress, but not on our platforms. These policy changes may take a few weeks to be fully implemented,” argues the new global affairs director.
