Zuckerberg announces changes to free speech on Meta (including the topic of gender)

I imagine they are competing with X for users.

@SecretSoul thanks for the insider admin view. It seems very odd that trusted admins can't challenge an automated deletion?
Anyway, as you say, "It feels like a way of trying to appease Donald Trump and get on his good side."
I think Musk being appointed by Trump to his executive has got Zuckerburg salivating.

It will be the word 'harmful' I guess.

I admin four groups on FB and have done for the last 12 years or so. One of the groups has 200,000+ members. The reason I mention that is that given the size, over the years we’ve had a whole bunch of ridiculous deletions. Shitloads. And quite a few years back, due to the size of the group, we were invited by FB to join a private group where we could get direct admin support from actual humans at FB, rather than the usual bot system (which is shit). We were also invited to visit FB offices in the US but neither of us wanted to go lol. Everything we’ve queried has been an automated deletion - every ridiculous deletion has been due to the algorithm misinterpreting posts.

I can tell you unequivocally that the vast, vast majority of deletions are picked up by FB algorithms. And appeals are automated too. Very few deletions are based on people reporting posts.

We've just randomly had posts deleted from our groups that are almost 10 years old 😂🤦🏻‍♀️ They’ve obviously tweaked the algorithm and it’s found fault with stuff our members posted many years ago. Which are, of course, absolutely fine and don’t breach community standards at all! Bloody stupid algorithms.

Anyway.

I don’t know what to make of this about-face in policy, and banishing fact-checking.

It feels like a way of trying to appease Donald Trump and get on his good side. And I don’t see that as a positive thing. Trump is so deeply deeply corrupt and increasingly maniacal, I genuinely fear what could happen. And having powerful men suck up to him even more than there is already just doesn’t bode well for democracy.

And it was actual FB that deleted and banned.

Yes most facebook deletions are by facebook.

The point is who is it that is reporting this posts to facebook.

I very much doubt FB has an algorithm to protect the identity of hornets!

And you will never know which local took it upon themselves to report you.

Its like all the SciFi stories about how people willingly become spies and informers for the government.

I was once banned for disinformation for pointing out that the hornet the fb locals were forming a mob over was actually a mimic hoverfly.

This was very nicely in a ‘don’t worry - it’s not harmful’ framing,

And it was actual FB that deleted and banned. Not a group moderator

Part of what is so absurd about all of this is thatZuckerberg got Trump thrown of Facebook (if my memory serves me well).

I know in the past politicians and business mean tried to present themselves as people with some morals, or wanting to be "respectable".

Now we just have a bunch of immature school boys who got lucky because they made a product that was right for that moment in time.

And somehow that has become as though they are automatically anointed as natural leaders, whose aspirations are ones we should all admire.

And in the end, they only feel comfortable with each other. ie just say something loudly enough, often enough and it is then the truth. As do Trump, Farage, and others.

The idea that this group of egos with pricks will be running the world is terrifying. Its like an outburst of ultra male madness.

And in their virtual world they seem to have no sense of how them harrassing people on line can turn into actual violence. Much as Trump always says he had no influence on the rioters at Capitol Hill this time last year.

eg Jess Phillips has now been told she needs to have extra security.

But just have to add, much as I despise them, it is more troubling that so many people admire them and their "values".

I still won't use it. I signed up nearly twenty years ago, never did more than create the account, and next day my boss said he'd been spammed by them saying he might like to join because people he knew had. One was me, the other a bloke who'd worked with us years earlier. I closed my account immediately.

What pisses me off is companies that don't have their own websites but just use FB. Means I can't even check their merchandise.

I've seen people leaving FB today as they can't use it without fact checkers.

That's hilarious.

Musk moved X to Texas as a huge FU to Gavin Newsom. I've seen people leaving FB today as they can't use it without fact checkers. What a load of old guff. I use FB for cat, pottery and family photos. Not for hard hitting political analysis.

I thought moving to Texas very interesting, a very different local workforce perhaps?
I wish we could take a look at who the moderators are/were - as they have held too much power and distorted social media in terrible ways. I'm thinking of when Musk first took over X and removed some furious, tantrumming agps. Also Aimee Challenor at Reddit.

"Zucked" is shorthand for being banned for thoughtcrime

IKR

I genuinely love the move from California to Texas. Way to go to get rid of all the grievance gerbils (sorry grim butts).

Does anyone, anywhere have any actual morals or principles? This weasel was happy to censor views and suppress stories when the wind was blowing in the other direction, now he’s suddenly concerned about free speech?

If it works in the same way as Community Notes on Twitter it will work better. The problem is when you start dictating that only some responses are allowed. It's fairer than Wikipedia.

These same self appointed thought police do the same on FWR as we know

IMO this will be no better for women and girls.

The whole nod towards ‘free speech’ is disingenuous. Dropping fact checkers is purely political ingratiation with Trump with some happy coincidence of lower costs thrown in. Who has the time, energy and inclination to become gate keepers moderators? It’ll be mostly men. Look at Wikipedia and how anti-women those moderators are. FB will become just like that.

Edited to add that Zuckerberg threw the fact checking companies under the bus pinning all blame on them for not being objective. As opposed to the thousands of Russian bot farms.

Not a spoof headline - actually from the New York Times:

Meta Says Fact-Checkers Were the Problem. Fact-Checkers Rule That False.

Fact-checking groups that worked with Meta said they had no role in deciding what the company did with the content that was fact-checked.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/07/business/mark-zuckerberg-meta-fact-check.html

I got a month long ban for commenting on a cat video. It was a news article about a man drop kicking someone's cat across the road. Apparently saying that I'd rip his head off if that were my cat, is inciting violence and against their rules. But videos of real cats being hurt is totally fine.

Meta’s decision to scrap its third-party fact-checking and to loosen content moderation has been labelled “chilling” and could have “dire consequences” for online safety, experts and campaigners have said.

The parent company of Facebook, Instagram and Threads said it was ending third-party fact-checking on posts in the US and would instead switch to an X-style Community Notes system where users flag content as false or misleading.

Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg said the decision was about “restoring free expression” on its platforms and “reducing mistakes” it said automated content moderation systems were making, with Meta saying it believed it was amounting to censorship in some cases, accusing some fact-checkers of being influenced by their own biases.

https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/mark-zuckerberg-meta-facebook-instagram-donald-trump-b2675302.html

Zuckerberg vowed to prioritise free speech after the return of Donald Trump to the White House and said that, starting in the US, he would “get rid of factcheckers and replace them with community notes similar to X”.

X, the social media platform owned by Elon Musk, relies on other users to add caveats and context to contentious posts.

Zuckerberg said Meta’s “factcheckers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created”. The tech firm’s content moderation teams will be moved from California to Texas “where there is less concern about the bias of our teams”, he said. He admitted that changes to the way Meta filters content would mean “we’re going to catch less bad stuff”.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/07/meta-facebook-instagram-threads-mark-zuckerberg-remove-fact-checkers-recommend-political-content

Its worth remembering that most deletes on facebook have been because someone has reported you.

There are very few automatic deletes.

So you may think you are part of a FB group that is supportive and friendly, but you can be sure that in that group will be someone whose sole purpose is to report posts they dont like.

These same self appointed thought police do the same on FWR as we know.

The issue then becomes that those who decide what is a valid complaint are more than likely be totally unqualified to arbitrate, and / or be by instinct an unrecontructed incel.

I have no faith in Zugerberg but I think even he has had to accept that appointing 3rd party groups to do their censorship for them is far too open to bias.

So apart from ingratiating himself with Trump (and contradicting his view point of a few years ago) he has also accepted that you cant delegate an unacountable group of people to take decisions you then have to support.

ie using freemarket methods to set up proper oversight of comments doesn't work.

But then given the culture in the states, I doubt an in house system would be much better.

Its not just that the tech bros rule the internet but increasingly the IRL world.

Their values will still prevail.

As much because too many users want to use their products.

I'm not on social media, but I gather that X is even worse than Twitter, so the idea of FB, Insta and the other Meta platforms modelling themselves on X doesn't sound great.

Community Notes is much better than "fact checks" by people with a particular bias.

So did Nick Clegg see the writing on the wall, or was he pushed?

Presumably this will also affect Instagram, so I wonder where all the institutions who gleefully announced they were leaving X in the past month or 2 to focus on Insta/Facebook plan to relocate now.

I got banned for liking too many cat posts on their suggested videos . Ie they thought i was spam . I mean I've seen spam constantly on most Facebook posts that are fake American soldiers but seems nothing is actually done to actual spammers/scammers

I used to admin a GC Facebook group. Occasionally we would get a notification from Facebook that they removed something someone posted in the group.

Yes I get those fairly regularly. Where you can see what they were, 9 times out of ten they strike me as a bit ridiculous.