“We overdid it”: Meta admits to censoring users too much and promises to do better in the future

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Here is an unexpected mea culpa. Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, admits to having been overzealous in its content moderation. Nick Clegg, the group's president of international affairs, acknowledged that error rates in removing content remain “far too high”, to the point of undermining the freedom of expression that the company claims to defend.

“Too often, harmless content is removed or restricted, and too many people are unfairly penalized,”, Clegg said at a press conference. The self-criticism comes as users of the group's platforms, including Threads, increasingly complain about arbitrary deletions of their posts.

The Covid-19 pandemic: an assumed excess of zeal

The most striking example of this over-moderation concerns the management of the Covid-19 crisis. CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently admitted to the House Judiciary Committee that this strict policy was influenced by pressure from the Biden administration.

“We had very strict policies removing huge volumes of content during the pandemic,”, Nick Clegg explains. “Nobody knew how the pandemic would unfold, so it's easy to judge with hindsight. But with hindsight, we think we overdid it a bit.”

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Despite investing billions of dollars in moderation, Meta's automated systems appear to err on the side of caution. “moderation failures”have recently been trending on Threads, the group's new platform. The company even had to publicly apologize after its systems deleted photos of President-elect Donald Trump surviving an assassination attempt. Meta's Oversight Board has sounded the alarm ahead of the US presidential election, warning against “excessive suppression of political speech”.

In the face of such criticism, Meta appears ready to rethink its approach. Nick Clegg has called the moderation rules a “living, breathing document”, suggesting that major changes could be coming. The move comes as Mark Zuckerberg has been increasing his outreach to politicians. The latest: a surprising dinner with the newly elected Donald Trump.

• Meta publicly admits to having been too strict in its content moderation, particularly during the Covid-19 pandemic
• The company's automated systems too often remove harmless content, affecting freedom of expression
• Major changes to moderation rules could be announced soon

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