In addition to , , this Tuesday (7) also indicates that the company will act more vehemently against initiatives to regulate platforms globally.
The owner of Meta (which includes the Instagram, , Threads and WhatsApp tools) says he will work with “to resist governments around the world that are persecuting American companies and pushing for more censorship” – citing in this excerpt Europe and “America’s courts Latina”, read as a reference to the STF (Supreme Federal Court), where there are initiatives to expand companies’ obligations.
He also announces that he will once again recommend political content, whose circulation had been reduced by the company itself in recent years. He argues that there was once a public call to “see less political content” but that “it feels like we’re entering a new era” in which the company is “starting to get feedback that people “want to see this content again.” .
And also that it will reduce restrictions on topics such as “immigration and gender”, without making clear the scope that content policy changes should take, and that it will stop using filters for automated detection of harmful content for “low-severity violations”, depending of user complaints.
Zuckerberg summarizes the measure as a trade-off. “We will detect less problematic content, but we will also reduce the number of posts and accounts from innocent people that we accidentally remove,” he says.
Although, in fact, there are a series of reports of platform errors, due to inappropriate removal of content, there is also criticism that a lot of harmful content remains online on the platform, including after complaints from users.
Based on the announced line of action, the recommended path is that critics who see inaction by companies in removing content should gain even more arguments. This is because, given the volume of content posted on them every day, the use of automated detection would be essential for effective moderation – which, according to Zuckerberg, would remain for “illegal and highly serious violations”.
Anchoring the defense of these new developments in freedom of expression, Zuckerberg used different arguments and terms aligned with the speech of far-right leaders, such as Donald Trump, who will assume the presidency on the 20th.
Regarding the end of partnerships with checkers, he also said that he will start using a model similar to that used by X (formerly Twitter), called Community Notes, and which was implemented by Elon Musk — a major donor to Trump and who will participate in the Republican’s administration.
Clara Iglesias Keller is a research leader in technology, power and innovation at the Weizenbaum Institute, in Germany and believes that the announcement demonstrates the need for public policies that establish guidelines for the platforms’ actions.
“This announcement is further proof that we have a largely digitalized public sphere in which the circulation of content is at the sole discretion of very powerful global companies”
“There is no mechanism for democratic participation in these processes,” he says. “These are unilateral decisions by the platform”, adding that he sees it as more of an ideologically inspired action with commercial interests than a reaction to a popular outcry.
