Meta is mistakenly removing too much content across its apps, according to a top executive.
Nick Clegg, Meta’s president of global affairs, told reporters on Monday that the company’s moderation “error rates are still too high” and pledged to “improve the precision and accuracy with which we act on our rules.”
“We know that when enforcing our policies, our error rates are still too high, which gets in the way of the free expression that we set out to enable,” Clegg said during a press call I attended. “Too often, harmless content gets taken down, or restricted, and too many people get penalized unfairly.”
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 pressure from the Biden administration influenced the decision.
“We had very stringent rules removing very large volumes of content through the pandemic,” Clegg said. “No one during the pandemic knew how the pandemic was going to unfold, so this really is wisdom in hindsight.
But with that hindsight, we feel that we overdid it a bit. We’re acutely aware because users quite rightly raised their voices and complained that we sometimes over-enforce, make mistakes, and remove or restrict innocuous or innocent content.”
Clegg’s comments suggest that, after years of ramping up to what is now billions of dollars in annual spend on moderation, Meta’s automated systems have become too ham-fisted.
Examples of “moderation failures” were recently trending on Threads, which has been plagued with takedown errors in recent months. The company publicly apologized after its systems suppressed photos of President-elect Donald Trump surviving an attempted assassination.
And its own Oversight Board recently warned ahead of the US presidential election that its moderation errors risk the “excessive removal of political speech.”
Meta has yet to make any major changes to its content rules since the election, though it sounds like big changes could be coming. During the call with reporters, Clegg referred to the rules as “a sort of living, breathing document.”
When I asked him about Zuckerberg’s dinner with Trump last week and if Meta still planned to resist government pressure to moderate, as Zuckerberg told the House Judiciary Committee, Clegg sidestepped the question.
