Mark Zuckerberg höll den 7 januari ett tal om Meta-plattformarnas framtid och hur företaget ska ”återgå till sina rötter”. Och visst fan känns det som att Jimmie Åkesson haft ett finger med i spelet? För vi snackar inte om botanik här, utan om att montera ner redan urvattnade modereringssystem och ge mer utrymme åt frihet – det vill säga desinformation och extremism.
Talet, som i princip var ett kärleksbrev till högerpopulister, innehöll löften om att skrota faktagranskning, rulla tillbaka policyer om bland annat invandring och könsidentitet, samt flytta modereringsteam från Kalifornien till Texas – ett val som knappast är slumpmässigt med tanke på att kritik mot sociala medier som ”vänstervridna” ekar högt just där.
Talet som sådant är det första gången jag hör, idag, trots att det redan florerat på Facebook i nästan två månader.
”Vi tar bort faktagranskare och ersätter dem med community-noter”
Zuckerberg erkände att Metas faktagranskning har varit ett misslyckande – men inte på grund av den snedvridna mängden skräp som flödar fritt på plattformarna, utan för att den ”förstört mer förtroende än den byggt upp”.
Lösningen? Ett ”community-notes”-system likt det på X, där vem som helst kan slänga in en egen sanning. Med andra ord: ett steg mot att göra Facebook och Instagram till rena propagandakanaler för den som kan mobilisera flest trollkonton och bottar.
Mindre censur, fler problem
Meta planerar också att skala ner sina AI-drivna modereringsfilter, vilket innebär att plattformen i högre grad kommer att förlita sig på att användare själva anmäler problematiskt innehåll. Zuckerberg hävdar att detta minskar felaktiga borttagningar av ”oskyldiga” inlägg, men i praktiken betyder det att modereringen blir svagare och att mer hat, desinformation och trakasserier kommer att flöda fritt.
Flytt till Texas och närmandet till Trump
I ett drag som känns mer ideologiskt än logistiskt flyttar Meta sina modereringsteam från Kalifornien till Texas, en delstat där republikanska politiker länge har anklagat sociala medier för att tysta konservativa röster.
Samtidigt flaggade Zuckerberg för ett närmare samarbete med Donald Trump, där Meta ska arbeta med hans administration för att ”motverka globala censurtrender”. I klarspråk? Meta vill att den amerikanska regeringen hjälper dem att undvika regleringar och rättsliga påtryckningar från andra länder, särskilt i Europa, där lagar för att bekämpa desinformation och näthat har skärpts.
Slutsatsen? Facebook blir en ännu skitigare sörja
Oavsett vad Zuckerberg säger om att ”återgå till rötterna”, handlar det här inte om att främja yttrandefrihet – det handlar om att ge fritt spelrum åt dem som skriker högst, sprider mest skit och tjänar mest pengar på det.
Att Meta nu öppet omfamnar Trump, smeker högerextrema konspirationsteoretiker medhårs och demonterar skyddsåtgärder som ens försökte hålla de värsta lögnerna i schack, betyder en sak: Facebook och Instagram är på väg att bli ännu mer kaotiska, farliga och genomruttnade än de redan är.
Men hey, det är väl precis vad Zuck vill.
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1525382954801931
Hello everyone.
I want to talk about something important today because it’s time to return to our roots regarding free expression on Facebook and Instagram.
I started building social networks to give people a voice.I gave a speech at Georgetown five years ago about the importance of protecting free speech, and I still believe in it today. But a lot has happened in the past few years.
There has been widespread debate about potential harm caused by online content.
Governments and legacy media have pushed for more and more censorship.
A lot of this is political, of course, but there are also a lot of legitimately bad things out there—drugs, terrorism, child exploitation—these are things we take very seriously, and I want to make sure we handle them responsibly.
So, we have built a lot of complex systems to moderate content, but the problem with complex systems is that they make mistakes.
Even if they accidentally censor just 1% of posts, that’s millions of people, and we have reached a point where there are too many mistakes and too much censorship.
The recent elections also feel like a cultural turning point toward once again prioritizing speech.
So, we are going to return to our roots and focus on reducing errors by simplifying our policies and reinstating free expression on our platforms.
More specifically, this is what we are going to do.
First, we are getting rid of fact-checkers and replacing them with community notes similar to X, starting in the United States.
After Trump was first elected in 2016, the media wrote non-stop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy.
We tried to address those concerns without becoming arbiters of truth.
But fact-checkers have been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they have built, especially in the U.S.
So, in the next two months, we will introduce a more comprehensive community notes system.
Second, we will simplify our content policies and remove many restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are out of touch with mainstream discourse.
What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and exclude people with different ideas, and it has gone too far.
So, I want to make sure that people can share their beliefs and experiences on our platforms.
Third, we are changing how we enforce our policies to reduce errors, which account for the vast majority of censorship on our platforms.
We used to have filters that scanned for any policy violations.
Now, we will focus those filters on addressing illegal and high-severity violations.
For lower-severity violations, we will rely on user reports before taking action.
The problem is that filters make mistakes and remove a lot of content that they shouldn’t.
So, by scaling them back, we will dramatically reduce the amount of censorship on our platforms.
We will also fine-tune our content filters to require much higher confidence before removing content.
The reality is that this is a trade-off.
It means we will catch fewer bad things, but we will also reduce the number of posts and accounts from innocent people that we mistakenly remove.
Fourth, we are bringing civic content back.
For a while, the community asked to see less politics because it was stressing people out.
So, we stopped recommending those posts, but it seems we are in a new era now, and we are starting to receive feedback that people want to see this content again.
So, we will begin reintroducing it on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads while working to keep communities friendly and positive.
Fifth, we are moving our trust and safety teams and content moderation operations out of California, and our U.S.-based content review team will now be headquartered in Texas.
As we work toward free expression, I believe it will help build trust to do this work in places where there is less concern about bias in our teams.
Finally, we are going to work with President Trump to push back against governments worldwide that are targeting U.S. companies and pressuring for more censorship.
The U.S. has the strongest constitutional protections for free speech in the world.
Europe has an increasing number of laws institutionalizing censorship, making it difficult to build anything innovative there.
Latin America has secret courts that can quietly order companies to take things down.
China has censored our apps from even operating in the country.
The only way we can push back against this global trend is with the support of the U.S. government.
And that’s why it has been so difficult over the past four years when even the U.S. government was pushing for censorship.
By going after us and other American companies, they have emboldened other governments to go even further.
But now we have the opportunity to restore free speech, and I am excited to seize it.
It will take time to get this right, and these are complex systems—they will never be perfect.
There are also many illegal things that we still need to work very hard to remove.
But the bottom line is that after years of our content moderation efforts focusing primarily on removing content, it is time to focus on reducing errors, simplifying our systems, and returning to our roots of giving people a voice.
I’m looking forward to this next chapter—stay well out there, and more to come soon.