Meta says that it is not going to shelve third-party fact-checking outside of the US, seeming to give weight to the rumors that the move in America was very much a political one.
Mark Zuckerberg himself laid out the sweeping changes to moderation, claiming that the Community Notes program that would be put in place instead would “empower the community”. He also pointed to X as an example of how this model works, which raised a few wry eyebrows.
However, the Meta chief followed the news just days later with a plea to the then soon-to-be president, Donald Trump – to protect US companies from EU fines, pre-empting a negative response to the moderation move outside of the US.
No Change for Meta Moderation Outside US…Yet
In an interview with Bloomberg, Meta’s head of global business Nicola Mendelsohn suggested that the company is going to keep the present status-quo but didn’t rule out changes in the future.
She said: “We’ll see how that goes as we move it out over the year. So nothing changing in the rest of the world at the moment, we are still working with those fact checkers around the world.”
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What Will Users See in the US?
The changes that will kick off in the US were laid out by Meta’s newly-appointed chief global affairs officer Joel Kaplan in a statement that was published alongside Zuckerberg’s video.
Kaplan said that Meta will “stop demoting fact-checked content.” He added too that a “much less obtrusive label indicating that there is additional information for those who want to see it” will replace “full screen interstitial warnings.”
Kaplan added that the company will be “getting rid of a number of restrictions on topics like immigration, gender identity and gender”.
Why Could There Be Issues for Meta in the EU?
The changes have already caused concern. Former Danish Prime Minister, Helle Thorning-Schmidt, who is co-chair of Meta’s independent oversight board, told the BBC that she was worried that there could be a spike in hate speech, especially towards people in the LGBTQ+ communities. “We are seeing many instances where hate speech can lead to real-life harm, so we will be watching that space very carefully,” she said.
However, she will not be alone in scrutinizing the content. A pre-emptive war of words has already kicked off between Zuckerberg and EU authorities. In an interview with Joe Rogan, the Meta CEO rallied against the EU fines his company has had to pay in antitrust rulings. He said: “I think it’s a strategic advantage for the US that we have a lot of the strongest companies in the world, and I think it should be part of the US strategy going forward to defend that.”
As reported by Reuters, Zuckerberg went as far as the say that EU rules were choking innovation. “Europe has an ever increasing number of laws institutionalizing censorship and making it difficult to build anything innovative there,” he said. But the European Commission hit straight back and said: “We absolutely refute any claims of censorship.” It also said that it did not prescribe any specific form of moderation for social media platforms but “…whatever model a platform chooses needs to be effective.”
So while Zuckerberg might now have the favor of the US president and approval for his hands-off model, other countries have a very different view of what moderation should look like.
