Meta is mistakenly removing too much content in its apps, according to a senior executive.
Nick Clegg, Meta's president of global affairs, told reporters Monday that the company's moderation “error rates remain too high” and pledged to “improve the precision and accuracy with which we act on our rules.” .
“We know that when we enforce our policies, our error rates remain too high, hindering the free expression we set out to allow,” Clegg said during a press conference I attended. “Too often, harmless content is removed or restricted, and too many people are unfairly penalized.”
He said the company regrets aggressively removing posts about the COVID-19 pandemic. CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently told the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee that the decision was influenced by pressure from the Biden administration.
“We had very strict rules that removed large volumes of content during the pandemic,” Clegg said. “During the pandemic, no one knew how it would play out, so in hindsight this really is wisdom. But in retrospect, we feel like we went a little overboard. We are very aware because users have rightly raised their voices and complained that sometimes we apply too much and make mistakes and remove or restrict harmless or innocent content.”
Clegg's comments suggest that, after years of growing to what is now billions of dollars in annual moderation spending, Meta's automated systems have become too clunky. Examples of “moderation failures” were trending recently on Threads, which has been plagued by deletion errors in recent months. The company publicly <a target="_blank" href="https://about.fb.com/news/2024/07/review-of-fact-checking-label-and-meta-ai-responses/”>he apologized after their systems deleted photos of President-elect Donald Trump surviving an assassination attempt. And its own Supervisory Board recently warned ahead of the US presidential election that his moderation errors risk “overly suppressing political speech.”
Meta has yet to make any known major changes to its content rules since the election, although it looks like big changes could be coming. Clegg referred to the rules as “kind of a living, breathing document” during the call with reporters.
Clegg referred to the rules as “a kind of living, breathing document.”
“I can't make running comments on conversations I wasn't involved in,” he said of Zuckerberg's recent dinner with Trump. “The administration is still meeting and the inauguration has not yet taken place, so the talks at this stage are clearly at a fairly high level. Mark is very interested in playing an active role in the discussions that any administration must have about maintaining America's leadership in the technological sphere, which of course is tremendously important given all the geostrategic uncertainties around the world and, in particular, the fundamental role that ai plays. will play on that stage.”
