Meta Is Adding Community Notes Model to Platforms in Order To Restore “Free Expression”
Mark Zuckerberg also announced changes in its moderation policies, as well as a “more personalized approach to political content.”
Mark Zuckerberg has announced a series of major changes that Meta will soon implement, including the introduction of a Community Notes system modeled after X’s, revisions in its content moderation policies and a “personalized approach” to political content on its platforms.
The founder shared via social media that the changes will highlight Meta’s commitment to free expression on platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Threads. As it gradually phases out its independent fact-checkers in the US, Meta’s new Community Notes model will allow for diverse perspectives and utilize the help of the community in flagging and providing context for misleading posts. The company will neither create nor choose which notes will be displayed for a less biased approach. “The recent elections feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech,” Zuckerberg said. “So we’re going to go back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies, and restoring free expression on our platforms.”
Zuckerberg announced its revised moderation policies as Meta faces backlash over their current system’s over-enforced rules, acknowledging that out of every 10 pieces of content removed due to violating policy, one to two of those could have been a mistake. In order to promote political discourse, Meta will ease restrictions on topics such as immigration and gender identity (which Zuckerberg called “out of touch with mainstream discourse”), and automated moderation will have a much stronger focus on severe violations like terrorism and child exploitation. On the other hand, minor violations will rely on the reports of users before enforcement actions are taken.
Meta plans to regularly report enforcement errors with more details about topics such as spam policy violations, with trust and safety teams getting relocated from California to Texas and other US locations. Additional staff have also been hired to speed up appeals while AI language models will be utilized to assist in providing secondary opinions on enforcement decisions. Finally, users will have more options to control the amount of political content they see on their timelines, and civic content will be treated like regular content in user feeds and will use likes and views to rank the posts.
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