Meta admits to 'unfairly' removing 'harmless content' from Facebook

On Tuesday, Meta acknowledged that "harmless content" was excessively banned from its social media sites during the election season. As a result, the company said its moderation policy violated the "free expression we set out to enable."

Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook, released a report indicating that its content moderation error rates were excessively high. Nick Clegg, Meta President of Global Affairs, wrote: "We know that when enforcing our policies, our error rates are too high, which gets in the way of free expression we set out to enable. Too often harmless content gets taken down or restricted and too many people get penalized unfairly. We will continue to work on this in the months ahead."

Clegg also expressed regret for the number of posts that Meta removed during the Covid pandemic in a call with reporters on Monday. CEO Mark Zuckerberg informed Congress in August that his company was compelled to act in this manner by the Biden administration.

"We had very stringent rules removing very large volumes of content through the pandemic," Clegg said, as per The Verge. "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."

In an August 26 letter to the House Judiciary Committee, Mark Zuckerberg expressed regret for not earlier disclosing that the Biden administration pressured the Big Tech giant to censor content, including humor and satirical comments about Covid. He said Biden's White House in 2021 "repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor" certain content and "expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn't."

Last month, Zuckerberg met with President-elect Donald Trump at his Mar-a-Lago residence. It remains unclear if he supported Trump in the general election, but Trump's deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, said that Zuckerberg has recognized that Trump is an "agent of change and prosperity" and "made it clear that he wants to support the national renewal of America under President Trump's leadership."