With content moderation changes, Mark Zuckerberg is playing to an audience of one

Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg is relinquishing himself of all sorts of responsibility and in turn, holding everyone else responsible. AFP

Just when it looked like Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang’s keynote at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas would dominate the news cycle, Meta’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, proved that his company still has the technological muscle and media clout to make headlines with an announcement about a seemingly unexciting topic: content moderation.

In a video posted to Meta’s Instagram platform that lasted for a little more than five minutes, Mr Zuckerberg mentioned all the characters sure to get the attention of people of just about every political persuasion. He touched upon US president-elect Donald Trump, politics, and even mentioned one of Meta’s biggest rivals, Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter).

For a chief executive not exactly known for his public speaking prowess or charismatic delivery, the video packed a punch. Some might say it was unwise to mention Mr Trump in such a politically charged environment. Others might have urged him to stay away from the mention of his social media competitor. Yet he dived straight in.

However, as they say in various technology circles these days, the decision to do so wasn’t a technical bug, but rather, it was a feature. It was a way to achieve a thunderclap with his announcement, a way to flood the zone with so much information that ultimately, the details get lost and yet the key constituencies are left happy.

Let’s try to focus on the substance for a moment though. After years of taking criticism from Democrats and Republicans over Meta’s content moderation policies, many of which were enacted with the help of third-party fact-checkers enlisted by the company, Mr Zuckerberg doesn’t want to deal with them any more.

Just how much is he tired of dealing with content moderation critics? He is now openly praising a feature that is prominent on X, called Community Notes, and saying that Meta will now implement something similar in both of its most used platforms, Facebook and Instagram.

On X, community notes add context or clarification to various posts that users deem inaccurate. X routinely approves people who apply to be community note editors, and for the most part, yes, the tool does help to clarify misleading posts. Even Mr Musk has occasionally been flagged with community note disclosures.

Yet I would hardly call it content moderation. Essentially, it is a way to crowd-source and give important context to content.

Even in his video message, Mr Zuckerberg acknowledged that Meta won’t be completely dismantling its content moderation apparatus, but rather, it will be moving some within the “trust and safety” team from Democratic Party-run California to Texas, a Republican Party stronghold, to lessen concern about what some perceive as political bias.

And with that, the entire strategy behind Mr Zuckerberg’s announcement became abundantly clear: it is about optics, and adjusting those optics to assuage those with political capital.

Slowly but surely, in a bipartisan manner throughout the US, the public’s mood soured on social media and Big Tech companies. There is concern about the potential, albeit unproven, addictiveness of social media feeds used by minors. There is a worry that smartphones are distracting far too many young people, and for that matter, their parents as well. And yes, concerns about disinformation continue to abound around the world.

All those fears, and all that angst, have taken much of the shine off these once-venerated companies such as Meta.

Yet it is worth noting that as of the writing of this article, Meta has a market cap of $1.56 trillion. It is not a plucky underdog with its feet unfairly being held to the fire. Between Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp, some estimate that more than 3.5 billion people in the world use a Meta-owned platform. It is a company with unprecedented success and almost unfathomable reach in terms of influence.

With all that power, there are bound to be calls to take some responsibility, and in the past few years those calls have translated into the need for content moderation.

Nobody said it was going to be easy, and it clearly wasn’t easy, as Mr Zuckerberg explained, borrowing a page from Mr Musk and blaming what he called “legacy media”, despite the fact that Meta itself is 21 years old – again, not exactly a startup.

“Starting in the US after Trump first got elected in 2016, the legacy media wrote non-stop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy. We tried, in good faith, to address those concerns without becoming the arbiters of truth, but the fact-checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created,” he claimed.

Mr Zuckerberg insisted, however, that Meta would still largely be on the lookout for posts that violate the law with regard to drugs, terrorism and child exploitation, among other things. But he also said that there were simply too many fires to put out when it came to less severe issues.

“So we built a lot of complex systems to moderate content, but the problem with complex systems is they make mistakes. Even if they accidentally censor just 1 per cent of posts, that’s millions of people, and we’ve reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship,” he said in his video address.

The solution, at least to Mr Zuckerberg’s mind, seems to be one of making content moderation society’s responsibility instead of Meta’s responsibility. Crowd source it, and let the chips fall where they may and consequences be darned.

In that same breath, he is also continuing to try to win over an audience of one, that audience being Mr Trump. It is worth remembering that the president-elect once threatened Meta, which had previously banned him from the platform after the January 6, 2021 insurrection. In response, Mr Trump bestowed Meta’s chief executive with the nickname, “Zuckerschmuck”.

Yet in Mr Trump’s most recent news conference, he said that Facebook had “come a long way”.

Mr Zuckerberg’s pivot might make for an obvious and brilliant strategic move. It also might buy Meta time amid what looks to be a momentum swing in the US Congress towards social media policy regulation for young people.

Ultimately, however, by punting on many parts of content moderation, Mr Zuckerberg is relinquishing himself of all sorts of responsibility and in turn, holding everyone else responsible. That could backfire in the long run.

He is also banking that Mr Trump won’t mercurially change his mind and once again turn on Meta. Given Mr Trump’s track record, that seems to be a fanciful wish.