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FRANCE 24 English
  • 1/10/2025

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Transcript
00:00Instagram has announced it is scrapping the fact-checkers on its platforms.
00:05Justifying the decision, the CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the moderators were
00:09quote, too politically biased and that it was
00:12time to get back to our roots around freedom of expression.
00:18The decision is a victory for Trump just weeks before he returns to power
00:22in Washington. Morgan Eyre has this report.
00:27There's been too much censorship. That's according to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
00:32He said the company, which owns Facebook and Instagram, wanted free expression to
00:36take priority. As a result, the tech giant will scrap
00:39its third-party fact-checking program in the U.S.,
00:42who Zuckerberg accuses of being biased. We built a lot of complex systems to
00:47moderate content. But the problem with complex systems is
00:50they make mistakes. Even if they accidentally censor just
00:53one percent of posts, that's millions of people. Meta is also
00:58relaxing rules on topics like gender and immigration,
01:01saying it will focus on tackling illegal activity like terrorism,
01:05drugs and child exploitation. Since the re-election of Donald Trump,
01:09Zuckerberg has been forging better ties with the Republican,
01:12who was banned from Facebook after the January 6th insurrection.
01:16He later called the platform an enemy of the people.
01:19We're going to work with President Trump to push back on governments around the
01:23world that are going after American companies
01:26and pushing to censor more. In recent days, Meta hired Republican
01:31policy executive Joe Kaplan as its global affairs head and
01:34appointed other prominent Trump allies to its board.
01:38Too much harmless content gets censored. Too many people find themselves wrongly
01:42locked up in Facebook jail. And we're often too
01:45slow to respond when they do. Content will instead be moderated by
01:49users themselves using a community note system.
01:52This is similar to what Elon Musk's X program uses,
01:55but reports suggest that this system so far has failed to address
01:59misinformation. Meta says it has no immediate plans to change the program
02:03in Europe. Well to talk a little more then about
02:07Zuckerberg's decision, Ross Burley is with us live. He is the
02:10co-founder of the Centre for Information Resilience. He joins us now
02:15from London. Hello to you and thanks for joining us today.
02:20Hi, how are you doing? Good, look, thanks for talking to us about all of this.
02:23Your organisation has issued a statement criticising that plan by Facebook to
02:28scrap its moderators. Just spell out for us what your concerns currently are.
02:34I feel as though this is a bit of a politically motivated move by
02:37Mark and Meta to scrap fact-checkers who,
02:42although they themselves have struggled against the torrent of
02:45disinformation and hate and abuse that you find on social media, at least
02:50they were basing their findings on fact.
02:53Meta, by doing this, are retreating from fact, they're retreating from
02:57truth and by switching to a community notes
03:01model, they're effectively trying to capture tidal wave in a bucket
03:05and it's not going to work. Look, so does that mean we're going to see
03:09much more disinformation spreading on Facebook?
03:13Undoubtedly we will. I mean there's already lots of disinformation on
03:18Facebook. Anybody who goes onto Instagram or Facebook or any of the
03:23Meta platforms will see plenty of
03:26disinformation and we're not just talking about the sort of
03:292014 Russian bot farm type disinformation,
03:33we're talking about grift, we're talking about people trying to
03:37make money out of this stuff, we're seeing people promoting posts
03:41around suicide, around the darkest recesses
03:45of society and making money out of it and trying to get clicks out of it.
03:50So already we're seeing a huge wave of this stuff
03:55online and by getting rid of the fact-checkers what you're doing is
03:58taking away a safeguarding and more than that
04:00you're sending a message to users and to the wider
04:04community that truth and facts just don't really matter anymore.
04:09Well I suppose the key question then is why
04:12Facebook and Zuckerberg is doing this because
04:16after Donald Trump won the election in 2016
04:19Facebook introduced lots of measures to try
04:23and curb disinformation that was spreading on the platform.
04:26It's now going very much the other way so you talked about politicisation,
04:32why is Zuckerberg doing this? Well the timing is interesting obviously
04:37with the incoming president about to take the reins in DC
04:43and obviously there is a sense of political expediency there. He doesn't
04:46want to annoy the incoming administration.
04:50Meta themselves have a number of pending court cases, not just in the
04:54US actually, but actually around the world
04:56including fact-checkers in places like Kenya for example
05:00who have suffered enormous mental health challenges
05:03by being fact-checkers. So I think there is a
05:07degree of bending the knee a little bit here
05:10with the new administration coming in and we've seen
05:13other tech figures in the US certainly trying to placate
05:20the president. So I think the timing can't be discounted
05:24but more generally I think it's despite the huge amount of
05:30disinformation that we increasingly see, it's abandoning truth, it's
05:36abandoning objective facts and it's sending a really terrible
05:39message. You mentioned those moderators now that are to lose their job, some of
05:43them as you say in Kenya suffering quite a bit
05:46because of the work that they're doing, the images that they're seeing.
05:49Zuckerberg though said they had to go in part because
05:53they were too politically biased. I wonder what you made of
05:57those comments? Well no system is perfect and we have seen
06:03incidents of some fact-checking organisations
06:06showing political bias. I think that's a fair thing to say
06:10but by the same degree you're asking a bunch of volunteers,
06:15often volunteers, which is what the previous fact-checking system
06:18relied on, seeing the most horrendous content
06:22and not getting any support for it. Now the alternative that
06:26Zuckerberg and Meta are suggesting here is the community notes
06:30system which still relies on volunteers. So in
06:34May last year I think ex-formerly Twitter
06:37had about 500,000 community people, users who used community
06:43notes. The vast majority of those are not professionals, they're just
06:46random users who want to put on a community note which means that
06:50there's no actual expertise in pretty complex systems
06:55and subjects. So for example you're not going to get academics talking about
06:59geopolitics or physics or any of the really complicated things that
07:02actually some expertise would be quite good on. You're just relying
07:06on random users who aren't even verified so there's no way of knowing whether
07:11they're real people or not and that's the huge flaw in the
07:14community note system. Ross Burley, lots more I'd like to ask
07:18you but unfortunately we're out of time. Thank you very much
07:21indeed though for speaking to us today. Thank you so much, thanks.
07:25Let's bring you some other news now because today