One more thing… straight from the founder of Facebook himself…
“Hey everyone. I want to talk about something important today because it’s time to get back to our roots around free expression on Facebook and Instagram. I started building social media to give people a voice. I gave a speech at Georgetown five years ago about the importance of protecting free expression, and I still believe this today, but a lot has happened over the last several years.
There’s been widespread debate about the potential harms from online content. Governments and legacy media have pushed to censor more and more. A lot of this is clearly political, but there’s also a lot of legitimately bad stuff out there. Drugs, terrorism, child exploitation. These are things that we take very seriously, and I want to make sure that we handle responsibly. So we built a lot of complex systems to moderate content, but the problem with complex systems is they make mistakes even if they accidentally censor just 1% of posts.
That’s millions of people, and we’ve reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship. The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards, once again, prioritizing speech. So, we’re going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies, and restoring free expression on our platforms…
We’re going to simplify our content policies and get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse. What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas, and it’s gone too far…
We’re changing how we enforce our policies to reduce the mistakes that account for the vast majority of censorship on our platforms. We used to have filters that scanned for any policy violation. Now, we’re going to focus those filters on tackling illegal and high-severity violations, and for lower-severity violations, we’re going to rely on someone reporting an issue before we take action. The problem is that the filters make mistakes, and they take down a lot of content that they shouldn’t…
Now we have the opportunity to restore free expression, and I’m excited to take it. It’ll take time to get this right, and these are complex systems. They’re never going to be perfect. There’s also a lot of illegal stuff that we still need to work very hard to remove. But the bottom line is that after years of having our content moderation work focused primarily on removing content, it is time to focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our systems, and getting back to our roots about giving people voice. I’m looking forward to this next chapter. Stay good out there, and more to come soon.”
Thanks, Zuck. Yes, thanks to Mark Zuckerberg for his acknowledgement this week that “the fact-checkers have just been too politically biased… it’s gone too far.”
Kudos, too, to the many of you who sent me articles on this development… and also, to the one who shared that I can now take some satisfaction in being one of the last to be censored by Meta.
Let me be clear. When Facebook chose to remove our post 10+ days ago — and not to restore it — I don’t think they were after me, so-to-speak. I don’t think there was any malicious motive nor nefarious intent specifically targeting us. For those unfamiliar with our journey, we wrote about the clear cover up of the mental decline of two of our elect, one being the sitting President of the United States. There exist valid questions as to the extent and length of his incapacitation and in regard to whom has actually been running the federal government. Facebook removed our respectful post, stating the content was “misleading.” There was an attempt to repost; it was also removed. There was no response to our subsequent appeal.
I don’t believe Facebook was after me. But what I do believe, echoing Zuckerberg, is that fact-checking has become too political; it morphs truth into subjectivity; and prompts way too many to fall prey to a narrative saying “we need to shut diverse perspective down.”
Naturally, we disagree with such an assertion. We believe the wisest way forward is to have the conversation.
Respectfully, of course.
AR