Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, said on Dec. 3 that harmless content was too often removed by mistake from its platforms during elections worldwide and pledged to improve its content moderation practices.
Nick Clegg, president of global affairs for Meta, said the tech giant has worked throughout the year to update and apply its content policies “fairly” to protect users’ freedom of expression on its platforms.
“We know that when enforcing our policies, our error rates are too high, which gets in the way of the free expression we set out to enable,” Clegg stated in a blog post. “Too often harmless content gets taken down or restricted and too many people get penalized unfairly.”
To address the issue, Clegg said that Meta has launched political content controls on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads to give users the option to receive more political content recommendations.
The tech giant also updated its penalties system to ensure that penalties would apply only to users who persistently violate the company’s policy.
Clegg said that Meta removed 20 covert influence operations globally this year. Russia remains “the number one source” of these operations, with 39 networks disrupted since 2017, followed by Iran and China.
Several Russian state media outlets were banned from Meta-owned platforms ahead of the U.S. presidential election over alleged foreign interference, he stated.
Clegg said that Meta will continue updating its moderation policies in the coming months to strike a balance between free expression and protecting users from false information, though he believed that “no platform will ever get [this] right 100 per cent of the time.”
COVID-19 Content
During a press call on Monday, Clegg acknowledged that Meta may have over-enforced its content moderation policies during the COVID-19 pandemic, resulting in the removal of large volumes of content.
The tech giant became aware of its mistakes after receiving complaints from users whose posts had been unfairly removed from its social media platforms.
“We had very stringent rules removing very large volumes of content through the pandemic,” Clegg was quoted as saying by The Verge on Monday. “No one during the pandemic knew how the pandemic was going to unfold, so this really is wisdom in hindsight. But with that hindsight, we feel that we overdid it a bit.”
In August, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg alleged that his company was pressured by “senior officials from the Biden administration” to censor certain COVID-19 content in 2021.
Zuckerberg said the government pressure was “wrong” and expressed regrets for yielding to those demands.
“Ultimately, it was our decision whether or not to take the content down, and we own our decisions, including COVID-19-related changes we made to our enforcement in the wake of this pressure,” he said in an Aug. 26 letter to Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.
Zuckerberg said that Meta would push back if the government tried to interfere again. The White House defended its move by saying that it encouraged responsible actions to protect public health and safety.
Meta censored content about COVID-19, lockdowns, or vaccines or that otherwise went against its policies during the pandemic.
Facebook and other Meta-owned platforms rely on third-party fact-checking networks to monitor content with false information, enabling Meta to reduce the distribution of such posts, according to its website.
The oversight board, an independent panel that reviews Meta’s content decisions, has previously warned that over-enforcing its moderation policy could result in “the excessive removal of political speech” and “undermine the ability to criticize government officials and political candidates.”
In July, Facebook apologized after it wrongly censored a photograph of President-elect Donald Trump raising his fist after surviving an assassination attempt during a campaign rally in Pennsylvania.
Stephen Katte and Reuters contributed to this report.
From The Epoch Times