Nick Clegg, president of global affairs at Facebook and Instagram’s parent company Meta, admits that moderation on the company’s platforms today is far too strict and that content is constantly deleted even though it does not violate any rules at all.
According to Clegg, moderation’s “error rates are still too high” and he claims that it now wants to “improve the precision and accuracy with which we act on our rules”, reports The Verge.
– We know that when enforcing our policies, our error rates are still too high, which gets in the way of the free expression that we set out to enable. Too often, harmless content gets taken down, or restricted, and too many people get penalized unfairly, he continues.
The Meta chief also claims to be remorseful about how Meta very aggressively censored users’ posts related to COVID-19, which, according to Mark Zuckerberg, was largely due to pressure from the Biden administration.
– We had very stringent rules removing very large volumes of content through the pandemic. 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. We’re acutely aware because users quite rightly raised their voice and complained that we sometimes over-enforce and we make mistakes and we remove or restrict innocuous or innocent content, he continues.
Extreme censorship
When Donald Trump was the target of an assassination attempt, photos and videos of the incident went viral on Facebook – but were also censored on a massive scale, which is just one of countless examples of what critics have described as politically motivated censorship.
A large number of words and terms are also effectively banned on Facebook today, and the arbitrary and extensive censorship has, according to critics, made it difficult to have any lengthy discussions about, for example, politics or news events.
It is unclear whether censorship will continue on the same scale as before during Trump’s presidency, and although the president-elect recently met with Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, Meta has not yet made any major known changes to its content rules.
