Below is Zuckerberg’s speech:
“Hello everyone.
Today I want to talk about something important, because it’s time to get back to our roots around free expression on Facebook and Instagram.
I started building these platforms to give people a voice. In my speech at Georgetown 5 years ago, I talked about the importance of protecting free speech, and I still believe that. But a lot has happened in recent years. There has been widespread debate about the potential harms of online content, and traditional media has pushed for more and more censorship. A lot of this was clearly political, but there are also a lot of things that should legitimately be considered bad: drugs, terrorism, child exploitation… These are things we take very seriously, and I want to make sure we handle ourselves responsibly. So we built a lot of complex systems to moderate content. But the problem with complex systems is that they make mistakes. Even if they accidentally censor just 1% of messages, that’s millions of people, and we’ve reached a point where there are too many errors, and too much censorship. The recent elections also feel like a cultural turning point, where free expression is once again being prioritized. So let’s go back to our roots and focus on reducing errors, simplifying our policies, and restoring free expression on our platforms.
More specifically this is what we are going to do:
First, Let’s get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with Community Notes, similar to those that exist in X, starting in the US. After Trump was first elected in 2016 the legacy media wrote endlessly about how misinformation It was a threat to democracy. We try in good faith to address those concerns without becoming the arbiters of truth. But the fact checkers operated in a way that was too politically biased, and have destroyed more trust than they created, especially in the US. Therefore, in the coming months we will introduce a more complete community rating system.
Second, we’re going to simplify our content policies and get rid of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender, restrictions that simply lost touch with mainstream discourse. What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to silence opinions and exclude people with different ideas, and it has gone too far. So I want to make sure that people can share their beliefs and experiences on our platforms.
Third, We will change the way we enforce our policies to reduce the errors that lead to the vast majority of censorship on our platforms. We used to have filters that looked for any policy violations. Now we are going to focus these filters on the fight against illegality and against highly serious violations. For less serious violations we will rely on someone to report a problem before taking action. The problem is that the filters make mistakes, and download a lot of content that they shouldn’t. So by reducing them, we are going to drastically reduce the amount of censorship on our platforms.
We’re also adjusting our content filters to require much greater assurance that we’re doing the right thing before removing certain content. The reality is that this involves winning some and losing some. It means we’ll catch less bad stuff, but we’ll also reduce the number of innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally remove.
Fourthlywe are bringing back civic content. For a while, the community asked to see less politics, because it stressed people out, so we stopped recommending those posts. But it seems like we’re in a new era, and we’re starting to get feedback that people want to see this content, so we’re going to start introducing it back to Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, while we work to maintain friendly communication. and positive.
Fifthly, We are moving our trust and safety, and content moderation teams out of California. and our content review for the United States will be based in Texas. Since we work to promote free expression, I think it will help us build trust to do this work in places where there is less concern about the bias of our teams.
Finally, We will work with President Trump to resist governments around the world that are targeting American companies, and pushing for more censorship. The US has the strongest constitutional protections of free speech in the world. Europe has a growing number of laws that institutionalize censorship and make it difficult to build or innovate there. Latin American countries have secret courts that can order companies to quietly remove content. China has even prevented our applications from working in the country. The only way we can address this trend is with the support of the United States government. And that’s why it’s been so difficult over the last four years, when even the US government was pushing to censor, going after us and other American companies. This has emboldened other governments to go even further. But now we have the opportunity to restore freedom of expression, and I am excited to accept this challenge. It will take time to get this right, and these are complex systems, which are never ever going to be perfect. There are also many illegal things, which we still have to work very hard to eliminate. But the bottom line is that after years of having our content moderation work focused primarily on removing content, it’s time to focus on reducing errors, simplifying our systems, and returning to our roots: giving people a voice. I’m looking forward to the next chapter.
May they do well. “We will see each other soon.”
