Founder Mark Zuckerberg has vowed to remove Facebook‘s political bias. Do you believe him?

This Writer would love to – I really would. He has admitted that the team that checks posts for accuracy was biased, and therefore unreliable, and has said it will be disbanded.

But this is to ingratiate himself with Donald Trump and bring Facebook in line with X – which we know Elon Musk used as a political tool for Trump in the run-up to the 2024 US Presidential election. So I have huge doubts.

Let’s look at the evidence:

So:

• Facebook’s fact-checkers were too politically-biased.
• They have destroyed trust in the platform.
• Content filters have been tuned to take down material based on very little evidence.
• They will be re-tuned to much higher standards.

The Guardian‘s article on this adds:

• Facebook owner Meta will recommend more political content on its platforms, which also include Instagram and Threads
• It will also ditch restrictions on topics including “immigration and gender”
• It will “work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world that are going after American companies and pushing to censor more”.

The article continues:

Zuckerberg said: “Governments and legacy media have pushed to censor more and more. A lot of this is clearly political, but there’s also a lot of legitimately bad stuff out there, drugs, terrorism, child exploitation. These are things that we take very seriously, and I want to make sure that we handle responsibly.

“So we built a lot of complex systems to moderate content, but the problem with complex systems is they make mistakes, even if they accidentally censor just 1% of posts, that’s millions of people, and we’ve reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship. The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards, once again, prioritising speech.”

He said that removing some restrictions on content on topics such as gender and immigration would “make sure that people can share their beliefs and experiences on our platforms” and he said the focus of filters that scan posts for policy violations would be shifted to only tackling illegal and high severity violations with Meta, relying on users to report lower severity violations before it takes action.

So Facebook has been riddled with censorship since – at least – the creation of the firm’s “oversight board” by Nick Clegg in 2020. No wonder left-wing pages have had such a hard time of it over the last five years!

But reading between the lines, it seems likely that Zuckerberg actually intends to bring in more political bias, in support of Donald Trump – which will only prolong the agony for sites like Vox Political.

The rest just strikes me as propaganda.

We don’t know when these changes will be brought into effect and we don’t know how we can measure them.

We don’t even know if they will happen in the UK because of strict censorship laws and restrictions on free speech that have been imposed here.

And if it doesn’t, what can we do about it? We can hardly complain because Facebook offers no contact details!

But on the face(book) of it, it seems to be a victory…

Right?

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