Meta admits it has been censoring for the last several years, now wants to copy Musk

Over the last eight years, ever since 2016 when Trump got elected, there has been a lot of talk about disinformation circulating on social media. Meta has tried to combat this with fact-checkers, but now, Mark Zuckerberg has come out calling them politically biased and is instead moving his social media platforms over to a community notes model, starting in the United States.

In a video that was posted by the CEO, he said that the zeitgeist around free speech seems to be changing, and he wants his platforms to change with it. He said that several years ago there seemed to be a sort of political exhaustion and political content was reduced in feeds. Zuckerberg said that this is now going to be reversed too.

Zuckerberg also spoke about global censorship. He said in Europe there are more and more censorship laws coming into place, in Latin America there are secret courts to pull down content, and in China he said Meta apps are blocked altogether. He said the free speech issue was made even more difficult over the last four years with the last administration, which he said was also trying to promote censorship.

Zuckerberg said that Meta will be working with the US government to push back against this increasing trend towards censorship. Under the new Meta approach, Zuckerberg said that users will be able to freely discuss issues like immigration and gender without being censored by the company. He said that initially, the measures were taken to promote inclusivity but have been used to shut down people with differing ideas and said that it had gone too far.

Whether you agree with the changes or not, one of the positive outcomes of this shift will be that the company will make fewer mistakes when it comes to taking down posts or accounts. The move will also allow the company to throw more resources at tackling illegal content such as child exploitation and terrorism.

Let us know in the comments what you think of these changes, will you be embracing them to say what you think, or will you be making a Bluesky account?