Meta says harmless content is mistakenly taken down ‘too often’

Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, said Tuesday its error rates can be “too high” when enforcing content moderation policies and pledged to improve their policy rollouts.

“We know that when enforcing our policies, our error rates are too high, which gets in the way of the free expression we set out to enable,” Nick Clegg, president of global affairs for Meta, wrote in a blog post Tuesday. “Too often harmless content gets taken down or restricted and too many people get penalized unfairly.“

Meta and other leading social media companies have faced increasing pressure in recent years to boost the safety of their platforms amid hateful or misleading information, while also ensuring users have free speech online.

The tech giant has worked throughout the past year to update and apply content policies “fairly," Clegg said, noting no platform will ever strike this balance correctly “100 percent of the time." He vowed the company will continue to work on this in the coming months.

He went on to tout Meta’s work on content moderation policies, including the launch of political content controls on Facebook, Instagram and Threads, which allow users to opt in for more political content recommendations. The controls were launched in the U.S. and are being rolled out globally, according to Clegg.

Clegg, during a separate call with reporters Monday, said Meta regrets the large amount of COVID-19 related content it took down during the pandemic, The Verge reported.

“We had very stringent rules removing very large volumes of content through the pandemic,” Clegg reportedly 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 voice and complained that we sometimes over-enforce and we make mistakes and we remove or restrict innocuous or innocent content,” he added, according to The Verge.

His comments come months after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told the House Judiciary Committee in August that he regrets not being more outspoken about “government pressure” to remove content related to COVID-19.

Zuckerberg, in a letter to the committee, said Biden administration officials “repeatedly pressured” Meta to “censor” content in 2021 and vowed to push back should something similar happen again.

The admittance was a win for House Republicans, many of whom have accused major tech companies of censoring conservative viewpoints.

Zuckerberg attended dinner with President-elect Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort last week in what was largely seen as an attempt to mend fences with the incoming leader as he heads back to the White House.

Clegg told The Verge that Zuckerberg is “very keen to play in active role in the debates that any administration needs to have about maintaining America’s leadership in the technological sphere.”

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