Nick Clegg, Meta’s Vice President of Global Affairs, admitted in a blog post that the tech company has a “high” error rate in content moderation, leading to “harmless” posts being censored.
Clegg explained that Meta is attempting to find a “balance” between “protecting people’s ability to express themselves with keeping people safe,” adding that “no platform will ever get right 100 per cent of the time.”
“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. Too often harmless content gets taken down or restricted and too many people get penalized unfairly,” he admitted.
Clegg went on to write that Meta “launched political content controls on Facebook, Instagram and Threads to give people the ability to have more political content recommended to them if they want.”
He noted, however, that Meta will not allow “claims or speculation about election-related corruption, irregularities, or bias when combined with a signal that content is threatening violence.” The company will also ban ads that question the legitimacy of an election.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg admitted earlier this year that the White House pressured the social media platform to censor Americans.
Writing to Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-OH), Zuckerberg said that in 2021, “senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree.”
Despite acknowledging that the platform faced “pressure” from the Biden administration, Zuckerberg said that it was “ultimately” the platform’s decision to “take content down, and we own our decisions, including COVID-19 related changes we made to our enforcement in the wake of this pressure.”
Meta is “ready to push back if something like this happens again,” he noted.