--:-- Ryan Knudsen: So are you aware that there's like this trend at the new year where people come up with lists for what's in and what's out?
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: I am aware of this. It is a very sad phenomenon.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Ryan, you really you don't you don't have an in and out list for yourself.
--:-- Guest: I don't. I don't have an in and out list for myself.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Well, if you were to come up with one for let's say, um, Facebook, what would be on its in list and on its out list?
--:-- Guest: I mean, in would be getting along with the new administration, and out would be content moderation.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Our colleague Jeff Horowitz covers Meta, Facebook's parent company. For nearly a decade, Meta and many other social media companies have taken an active role in policing content on their platforms, taking down posts with hate speech, or sticking fact-checking labels on viral content.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: But now, for Meta, that era is over.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: 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.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Earlier this week, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted a video announcing big changes to how Facebook, Instagram, and threads will moderate content.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: The bottom line is that after years of having our content moderation work focus 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.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: So it's sort of this like wholesale departure slash rejection of the idea that the platform should even govern itself rather than like a question of is it doing a good enough job?
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: It's like, nah, this isn't our job.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business and power.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: I'm Ryan Knudsen. It's Thursday, January 9th.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Coming up on the show, Meta's major retreat on content moderation.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: CRM was supposed to improve customer relationships. Instead, it's shorthand for can't resolve much.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Which means you may have sunk a fortune into software that just bounces customer issues around but never actually solves them.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: On the ServiceNow AI platform, CRM stands for something better.
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--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Let's go back in time for a minute.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Can you tell me the story of where Facebook's content moderation system came from?
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: I mean, in any truly substantive sense, it was post-2016.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: So there was this succession of scandals and crises from fake news in the United States.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Facebook now under fire.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Critics say it allowed fake news to spread on the platform.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Potentially... to Russian election interference.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: ABC News has obtained some of the posts and ads congressional investigators say the Russians planted on Facebook as part of the Kremlin.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: To the genocide in Myanmar.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Facebook has been accused by U.N. investigators and human rights groups of facilitating violence against the minority Rohingya Muslims in Burma.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: All of these things were sort of pointing in the direction of the company needs to do more.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: And for a few years, the company really did.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Initially Zuckerberg was reluctant to moderate content beyond what was legally required.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: In November 2016 he said quote We must be extremely cautious about becoming arbiters of truth ourselves
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: But there was so much pressure on Facebook, from lawmakers, legacy media outlets, and advertisers, that Zuckerberg eventually gave in.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: And the company spent billions of dollars building out a massive content moderation machine.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: At the peak of Facebook's content moderation system, like when it was doing the most, what did that look like?
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: What did it actually do?
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: A few things.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: There was first just an army of human moderators, mostly outsourced.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Then there was efforts to improve the quality of news on the platform, like to sort of weight the system in favor of outlets that users said they trusted rather than like kind of random fly-by-night headlines.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: And there were also automated systems sort of scouring the platform for things that were violations of the platform's rules and demoting them, if not outright removing them.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: In addition to those outsourced moderators who reviewed user posts for things like hate speech, Facebook also started using fact checkers to identify and label false or misleading articles.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Fact checkers were in some ways the beachhead for all of this stuff.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: And ironically, I think it was one of the things that they felt was the least controversial originally, which is that they were going to contract with like respected known entities that adhered to journalistic standards, had accreditation.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: News organizations like the Associated Press.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Yeah, like the Associated Press, like PolitiFact, Reuters, I believe, was for a while in there, Snopes.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: So these were all entities that were basically supposed to just find viral content that was false and flag it.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: And that would serve two purposes.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: One is it would notify users who saw the post that there were at the very least some serious reservations about its accuracy.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: And the second thing is that it was going to get used by Facebook to sort of slow down the spread of things.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Didn't mean it would go away or, you know, they'd take it down.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: It just meant that, like, they weren't going to actively promote it.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: And so this was, like, I think a big part of the company's efforts to deal with fake news on its platform was this initiative.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: How effective was this system?
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Did it seem to actually work to slow down the spread of misinformation and hate speech on Facebook?
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: There's two ways to answer that, right?
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: The first one is that, no, it never worked great.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: The second answer is that it was all the platform had.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: And it was, therefore, invaluable.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Fact checks were always slower than virality.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: By the time a fact checker got around to publishing something saying, this is false, here are the citations, usually that thing had gotten most of the traffic it was going to get.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Right, the lie gets halfway around the world before the truth puts its pants on, right?
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Yeah.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: And that also applied to Facebook.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: And the lie travels a lot faster when it's running on, you know, a social media platform's recommendation system, right?
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: But what you're saying is that it was still better than nothing.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: It still did... This was the core of the defense, yeah.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: The other issue with Meta's content moderation systems was that the rules around what people could and couldn't say became very detailed and nuanced.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: And the company struggled to make rules that prevented hate speech but still allowed users to express themselves.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: For instance, Facebook's rules didn't let users say things like, I hate women.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: But such a comment might be okay if it was referring to a romantic breakup.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Adjudicating this stuff was, like, really difficult.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: And also, whatever a human might decide about things like that, trying to get an algorithm to make a similar decision was, like, nearly impossible.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: So it was, I think, a very frustrating process, particularly for a bunch of very tech-minded people, because these were not problems that lent themselves to just building a solution, a technical solution, and setting it loose and moving on to the next problem.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: They were kind of chronic, societal, context-based, all the things that tech does not succeed at, if that makes sense.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Inevitably, the system made a lot of mistakes.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Many people had posts taken down or suppressed that actually didn't violate the rules.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: And it frustrated users.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Even Zuckerberg himself got frustrated, according to people familiar with the matter.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: In late 2023, he posted about tearing his ACL and got far less engagement than he expected because the platform deprioritized viral posts about health.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Conservatives especially felt like Facebook content moderation systems unfairly targeted them
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: There the question of like why are Christian posts about abortion getting taken down by fact checkers
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Why are so many conservative news outlets being penalized for false news?
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Why wasn't I allowed to say this particular word about that particular group when I can say it on the street and it's perfectly legal?
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: And so there was a lot of concern that Facebook was over-enforcing on the right.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: And then every time there was a moderation mistake and a lot of them happen.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: You know, there was the implication that this was Facebook acting to harm conservatives.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Facebook had purposely and routinely suppressed conservative stories from trending news.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: If you share my podcast on Facebook, I got hundreds of emails from people who said that this post has been marked as spam.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: People try to type my name into the search box on Instagram or the Discover box.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: My account does not show up.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: It's relentless.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: I'm thinking about quitting Facebook.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Over the years, Facebook made lots of tweaks to its content moderation system.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: For example, in 2019, it said it would stop fact-checking political ads.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: But overall, the system stayed in place.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: How did Mark Zuckerberg seem to feel about all these efforts?
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Mark never loved this stuff.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Mark, I think, was always deeply skeptical of human intervention of any variety in the system.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: And then Donald Trump's victory in the 2024 election gave Zuckerberg an opportunity to make a big change.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: I think it's kind of part of an overall, I would say, shift in Silicon Valley in which dominant companies have all been making extremely nice with the incoming administration.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: And obviously Donald Trump had made clear that he very much cared about whether Facebook was stacked against him and that he did not trust the company and its liberal employee base, to be fair, and that he might go after Mark Zuckerberg personally if Mark Zuckerberg didn't oblige.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Trump writes in the caption that Zuckerberg plotted against him during his reelection campaign and warns Zuckerberg, quote, if he does anything illegal this time, he will spend the rest of his life in prison.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Again, I don't know that anyone had to twist Mark Zuckerberg's arm about this.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: He was personally agreed by it.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: He didn't, you know, it was costly and expensive.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: And he never had an interest in doing it in the first place.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: So, you know, what about the content moderation system was there to like?
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: What these new changes mean for Meta's platforms?
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: That's next.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Today we helped a Latte for Sam Coffee shop get an insurance quote Simply and easily
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: And made sure A floral delivery van Was able to make someone's day
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: We're the Hartford
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: With decades of experience Insuring millions of unique small businesses
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: When it comes to your small business insurance
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Thank you
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: One size absolutely does not fit all
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Get a quote or find an agent today at thehartford.com slash smallbusiness
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: I started building social media to give people a voice.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: In his video earlier this week, Zuckerberg said that politics was a factor in the company's decision to dial back on content moderation.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: 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.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: And he is explaining that the company spent a number of years trying in good faith to placate its critics in the legacy media over things like fake news, etc.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: And that, you know, it did its best, but that it really went too far.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: We built a lot of complex systems to moderate content.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: But the problem with complex systems is they make mistakes.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Even if they accidentally censor just 1% of posts, that's millions of people.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: And we've reached a point where it's just too many mistakes and too much censorship.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Zuckerberg said Facebook would end its fact-checking program and replace it with Community Notes, a user-generated system similar to what X does.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: 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.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: And it's gone too far.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: There are some very specific changes to rules that are hard to read as anything other than the company trying to get out of the way of future controversies
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: So for example like the question on whether you can call transgender people it like that is specifically a carve out that you can now do on it violate the hate speech rules on Facebook anymore.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: But it used to, previously it did.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Yeah, it used to.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Likewise, you can say that homosexuality is a mental illness.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: That previously would have been a violation.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Likewise, you can liken women to household objects and liken them to personal property, right?
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: And like you could see where some of the cultural fights are that the company is like very directly responding to in those specific rule changes.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: And the specific rule changes are like the least important part of all of this.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: But I think they're a pretty good indication of the idea that the company is very happy to sort of bend not just its moderation structure, but also the rules themselves to this new era, as Mark Zuckerberg referred to it.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Meta isn't getting rid of content moderation entirely.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: There are still rules that prohibit what Zuckerberg called, quote, legitimately bad stuff, including terrorism and child exploitation.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Zuckerberg also said that the team that reviews U.S. content will be relocated from California to Texas because Zuckerberg said there was less of a concern that the employees there would be biased.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: So what do all these changes at Meta say about just how difficult it is to moderate content on the internet?
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: I mean, it's obviously difficult and these are not, you know, you don't solve misinformation, right?
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: You know, trying to like somehow make the internet always factual is like clearly not going to work out.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: But you know, there's the question of like, do you keep trying at this stuff?
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Like, does the platform sort of like take some responsibility for efforts to mislead and try to address those?
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Or like, is that just kind of not in scope?
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: So I think this is like less of a question of like the feasibility of doing it than it is a question of whether anyone wants to do it at all.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: I see.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: And so for Zuckerberg at Meta, it seems like he's decided that this is something that he doesn't really want to do.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Exactly.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Cutting out fact-checking, getting away from content moderation, prioritizing not making false moderation calls, overdoing effective moderation in the first place, these are things that like Mark actively wanted to do.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Honestly, from the first Trump term, not, you know, this wasn't a new sudden desire or willingness.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: It was that I think the circumstances were such that it was time to make this happen.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Where do you think Facebook is going to go from here?
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Do you think this is the end of this story when it comes to Facebook's content moderation efforts, that this will be the regime that will last long into the future?
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Or is it possible that this could all change again in a few years?
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Of course this will all change again at some point.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: The EU is going to have strict rules, so how much of this stuff applies to the EU is kind of still to be determined.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Like whether getting rid of fact checkers is something that the EU will tolerate.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: And I think something else that is a question is what the user experience is.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: I think something that a lot of people who worked at Facebook Gone Integrity issues have long believed, is that as much as the company resented basically having this sort of bunch of safety-minded nerds telling them, you know, you shouldn't do that, that the safety work was essential to making the platform like a livable place, not necessarily always clean and well-lit and, you know, perfectly civil, but livable.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: And I think that it will be interesting to see to what degree they were correct and to what degree, you know, this was all just sort of vanity and ineffectual.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: I think we'll certainly see what Facebook and Instagram look like in this new era as well and, you know, see how far it goes and what that means for users.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: That's all for today.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Thursday, January 9th.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Additional reporting in this episode by Alexa Kors and Megan Bobrowski.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Thanks for listening.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: See you tomorrow.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Yo, this is important, man.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Uh, my favorite Lululemon shorts, the ones you got me back in the day.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: I think they're pace breakers, the ones with all the pockets.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Well, I just got back from vacation and I think I left them in my hotel room.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: And dude, I need to replace these shorts.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: I wear them like every day with that Lulu hoodie you got me.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Could you send me the link to where you got them?
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Thanks, bro.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Talk soon.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Looking for your newest go-tos?
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Shop Lululemon's best sellers now at lululemon.com.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: I am aware of this. It is a very sad phenomenon.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: Initially Zuckerberg was reluctant to moderate content beyond what was legally required.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: In November 2016 he said quote We must be extremely cautious about becoming arbiters of truth ourselves
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: But there was so much pressure on Facebook, from lawmakers, legacy media outlets, and advertisers, that Zuckerberg eventually gave in.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: And the company spent billions of dollars building out a massive content moderation machine.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: At the peak of Facebook's content moderation system, like when it was doing the most, what did that look like?
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: What did it actually do?
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: A few things.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: There was first just an army of human moderators, mostly outsourced.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: Then there was efforts to improve the quality of news on the platform, like to sort of weight the system in favor of outlets that users said they trusted rather than like kind of random fly-by-night headlines.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: And there were also automated systems sort of scouring the platform for things that were violations of the platform's rules and demoting them, if not outright removing them.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: In addition to those outsourced moderators who reviewed user posts for things like hate speech, Facebook also started using fact checkers to identify and label false or misleading articles.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: Fact checkers were in some ways the beachhead for all of this stuff.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: And ironically, I think it was one of the things that they felt was the least controversial originally, which is that they were going to contract with like respected known entities that adhered to journalistic standards, had accreditation.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: News organizations like the Associated Press.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: Yeah, like the Associated Press, like PolitiFact, Reuters, I believe, was for a while in there, Snopes.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: So these were all entities that were basically supposed to just find viral content that was false and flag it.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: And that would serve two purposes.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: One is it would notify users who saw the post that there were at the very least some serious reservations about its accuracy.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: And the second thing is that it was going to get used by Facebook to sort of slow down the spread of things.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: Didn't mean it would go away or, you know, they'd take it down.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: It just meant that, like, they weren't going to actively promote it.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: And so this was, like, I think a big part of the company's efforts to deal with fake news on its platform was this initiative.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: How effective was this system?
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: Did it seem to actually work to slow down the spread of misinformation and hate speech on Facebook?
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: There's two ways to answer that, right?
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: The first one is that, no, it never worked great.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: The second answer is that it was all the platform had.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: And it was, therefore, invaluable.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: Fact checks were always slower than virality.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: By the time a fact checker got around to publishing something saying, this is false, here are the citations, usually that thing had gotten most of the traffic it was going to get.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: Right, the lie gets halfway around the world before the truth puts its pants on, right?
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: Yeah.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: And that also applied to Facebook.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: And the lie travels a lot faster when it's running on, you know, a social media platform's recommendation system, right?
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: But what you're saying is that it was still better than nothing.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: It still did... This was the core of the defense, yeah.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: The other issue with Meta's content moderation systems was that the rules around what people could and couldn't say became very detailed and nuanced.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: And the company struggled to make rules that prevented hate speech but still allowed users to express themselves.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: For instance, Facebook's rules didn't let users say things like, I hate women.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: But such a comment might be okay if it was referring to a romantic breakup.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: Adjudicating this stuff was, like, really difficult.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: And also, whatever a human might decide about things like that, trying to get an algorithm to make a similar decision was, like, nearly impossible.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: So it was, I think, a very frustrating process, particularly for a bunch of very tech-minded people, because these were not problems that lent themselves to just building a solution, a technical solution, and setting it loose and moving on to the next problem.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: They were kind of chronic, societal, context-based, all the things that tech does not succeed at, if that makes sense.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: Inevitably, the system made a lot of mistakes.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: Many people had posts taken down or suppressed that actually didn't violate the rules.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: And it frustrated users.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: Even Zuckerberg himself got frustrated, according to people familiar with the matter.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: In late 2023, he posted about tearing his ACL and got far less engagement than he expected because the platform deprioritized viral posts about health.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: Conservatives especially felt like Facebook content moderation systems unfairly targeted them
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: There the question of like why are Christian posts about abortion getting taken down by fact checkers
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: Why are so many conservative news outlets being penalized for false news?
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: Why wasn't I allowed to say this particular word about that particular group when I can say it on the street and it's perfectly legal?
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: And so there was a lot of concern that Facebook was over-enforcing on the right.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: And then every time there was a moderation mistake and a lot of them happen.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: You know, there was the implication that this was Facebook acting to harm conservatives.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: Facebook had purposely and routinely suppressed conservative stories from trending news.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: If you share my podcast on Facebook, I got hundreds of emails from people who said that this post has been marked as spam.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: People try to type my name into the search box on Instagram or the Discover box.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: My account does not show up.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: It's relentless.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: I'm thinking about quitting Facebook.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: Over the years, Facebook made lots of tweaks to its content moderation system.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: For example, in 2019, it said it would stop fact-checking political ads.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: But overall, the system stayed in place.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: How did Mark Zuckerberg seem to feel about all these efforts?
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: Mark never loved this stuff.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: Mark, I think, was always deeply skeptical of human intervention of any variety in the system.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: And then Donald Trump's victory in the 2024 election gave Zuckerberg an opportunity to make a big change.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: I think it's kind of part of an overall, I would say, shift in Silicon Valley in which dominant companies have all been making extremely nice with the incoming administration.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: And obviously Donald Trump had made clear that he very much cared about whether Facebook was stacked against him and that he did not trust the company and its liberal employee base, to be fair, and that he might go after Mark Zuckerberg personally if Mark Zuckerberg didn't oblige.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: Trump writes in the caption that Zuckerberg plotted against him during his reelection campaign and warns Zuckerberg, quote, if he does anything illegal this time, he will spend the rest of his life in prison.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: Again, I don't know that anyone had to twist Mark Zuckerberg's arm about this.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: He was personally agreed by it.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: He didn't, you know, it was costly and expensive.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: And he never had an interest in doing it in the first place.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: So, you know, what about the content moderation system was there to like?
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: What these new changes mean for Meta's platforms?
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: That's next.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: Today we helped a Latte for Sam Coffee shop get an insurance quote Simply and easily
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: And made sure A floral delivery van Was able to make someone's day
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: We're the Hartford
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: With decades of experience Insuring millions of unique small businesses
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: When it comes to your small business insurance
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: Thank you
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: One size absolutely does not fit all
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: Get a quote or find an agent today at thehartford.com slash smallbusiness
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: I started building social media to give people a voice.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: In his video earlier this week, Zuckerberg said that politics was a factor in the company's decision to dial back on content moderation.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: 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.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: And he is explaining that the company spent a number of years trying in good faith to placate its critics in the legacy media over things like fake news, etc.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: And that, you know, it did its best, but that it really went too far.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: We built a lot of complex systems to moderate content.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: But the problem with complex systems is they make mistakes.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: Even if they accidentally censor just 1% of posts, that's millions of people.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: And we've reached a point where it's just too many mistakes and too much censorship.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: Zuckerberg said Facebook would end its fact-checking program and replace it with Community Notes, a user-generated system similar to what X does.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: 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.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: And it's gone too far.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: There are some very specific changes to rules that are hard to read as anything other than the company trying to get out of the way of future controversies
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: So for example like the question on whether you can call transgender people it like that is specifically a carve out that you can now do on it violate the hate speech rules on Facebook anymore.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: But it used to, previously it did.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: Yeah, it used to.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: Likewise, you can say that homosexuality is a mental illness.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: That previously would have been a violation.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: Likewise, you can liken women to household objects and liken them to personal property, right?
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: And like you could see where some of the cultural fights are that the company is like very directly responding to in those specific rule changes.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: And the specific rule changes are like the least important part of all of this.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: But I think they're a pretty good indication of the idea that the company is very happy to sort of bend not just its moderation structure, but also the rules themselves to this new era, as Mark Zuckerberg referred to it.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: Meta isn't getting rid of content moderation entirely.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: There are still rules that prohibit what Zuckerberg called, quote, legitimately bad stuff, including terrorism and child exploitation.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: Zuckerberg also said that the team that reviews U.S. content will be relocated from California to Texas because Zuckerberg said there was less of a concern that the employees there would be biased.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: So what do all these changes at Meta say about just how difficult it is to moderate content on the internet?
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: I mean, it's obviously difficult and these are not, you know, you don't solve misinformation, right?
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: You know, trying to like somehow make the internet always factual is like clearly not going to work out.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: But you know, there's the question of like, do you keep trying at this stuff?
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: Like, does the platform sort of like take some responsibility for efforts to mislead and try to address those?
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: Or like, is that just kind of not in scope?
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: So I think this is like less of a question of like the feasibility of doing it than it is a question of whether anyone wants to do it at all.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: I see.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: And so for Zuckerberg at Meta, it seems like he's decided that this is something that he doesn't really want to do.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: Exactly.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: Cutting out fact-checking, getting away from content moderation, prioritizing not making false moderation calls, overdoing effective moderation in the first place, these are things that like Mark actively wanted to do.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: Honestly, from the first Trump term, not, you know, this wasn't a new sudden desire or willingness.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: It was that I think the circumstances were such that it was time to make this happen.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: Where do you think Facebook is going to go from here?
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: Do you think this is the end of this story when it comes to Facebook's content moderation efforts, that this will be the regime that will last long into the future?
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: Or is it possible that this could all change again in a few years?
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: Of course this will all change again at some point.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: The EU is going to have strict rules, so how much of this stuff applies to the EU is kind of still to be determined.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: Like whether getting rid of fact checkers is something that the EU will tolerate.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: And I think something else that is a question is what the user experience is.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: I think something that a lot of people who worked at Facebook Gone Integrity issues have long believed, is that as much as the company resented basically having this sort of bunch of safety-minded nerds telling them, you know, you shouldn't do that, that the safety work was essential to making the platform like a livable place, not necessarily always clean and well-lit and, you know, perfectly civil, but livable.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: And I think that it will be interesting to see to what degree they were correct and to what degree, you know, this was all just sort of vanity and ineffectual.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: I think we'll certainly see what Facebook and Instagram look like in this new era as well and, you know, see how far it goes and what that means for users.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: That's all for today.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: Thursday, January 9th.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: Additional reporting in this episode by Alexa Kors and Megan Bobrowski.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: Thanks for listening.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: See you tomorrow.
--:-- Jeff Horowitz: Yo, this is
