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

Yep.

'Changes to free speech' is one way of putting it, but it also means that Meta is doing away with third-party fact checking, which, it used to proudly boast, was an ethically-inspired defence against misinformation.

If 'fact-checking' was indeed the source of censorship, It's a good thing it's gone, but isn't it interesting how quickly 'ethics' gets dumped by these big companies when the political climate changes?

Zuckerberg said
“We’re going to get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with community notes similar to X (formerly Twitter), starting in the US” .

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.

Unless of course it encourages even more people to leave the billionaire tech-bros profit-driven universe of social media ...

Reading that statement it feels like the house of cards could be collapsing for gender

Good points made above about group rules and automatic censorship. I post links toarticles abput women's rights that dance around the edges of gender, hoping my friends and relations will join the dots in their own woke heads, but might try something more on point after this announcement. It's a bit awkward given the brother situation.

I did also see Nick Clegg has left FB and wondering where he will pop up next. Maybe the family wants to come back to the UK and he will be looking for some quango top job.

This is very good news. I think that X relaxing its moderation has had a noticeable effect in shifting elite opinions on this and other issues. And FB is way more widely used than X.

It's depressing of course how unprincipled it all is (I doubt this would have happened if Kamala had won). But we must take our wins where we find them!

It sounds potentially very interesting and positive on the whole. I suppose the proof of the pudding will be in the eating. It is hard to know which parts of what he says are motivated by a genuine and principled desire to promote free and constructive discourse, and which parts are weaselly responses to perceived threats to his business model.

I disliked his claim that the pressure towards censorship has largely come from 'legacy media' and foreign states. Most of the censorship faced by gender critical women seems to come precisely from the US and social media.

Still, what matters is whether there is improvement based on the changes he has announced. Watch and wait seems in order.

This is US election result-related, isn't it?

Because he didn't give a shit about restricting (left-abhorred) free speech when the Dems were in.

you're right, they can, you can set the rules in your own groups - but FB are moving THEIR moderation operation to TEXAS from California, away from the bias (which is a VERY interesting corporate move I think) so you cannot be automatically banned / posts deleted for "wrong think" on gender.

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. It was done automatically based on algorithms. Often use of words like dyke would trigger it.

Facebook is a law unto itself so time will tell. I've lost count of the bans I've had and I've never posted anything controversial.

https://about.fb.com/news/2025/01/meta-more-speech-fewer-mistakes/

We want to undo the mission creep that has made our rules too restrictive and too prone to over-enforcement. We’re getting rid of a number of restrictions on topics like immigration, gender identity and gender that are the subject of frequent political discourse and debate. It’s not right that things can be said on TV or the floor of Congress, but not on our platforms. These policy changes may take a few weeks to be fully implemented.

Surely admins of FB groups will still do as they please?

I've had many Facebook bans and lost profiles thanks to the left wing biased moderation on Facebook.

Let's hope we can now say what we want.