Meta execs have told advertisers in the US that they are “100 per cent” committed to brand safety, despite the remarkable U-turn on content moderation from CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Monika Bickert, Meta’s VP of content policy said Meta wanted to remove content that contributed to increased safety risks, but “allow people to talk about the news and the world around them and not be overly restrictive” according to the Wall Street Journal.
Bickert said that Meta would be swapping the term “hate speech” which has “different meanings to different people” for “hateful conduct.
In practice, this would mean that the statement “women should not be allowed to serve in combat” for instance, would have been prohibited before, as a call to exclude people from a job based on their gender. Now it’s fair game.
Marketers can still tune their settings to exclude placements next to controversial posts, though it remains to be seen how effective they will be.
“We regularly meet with our partners to share information and hear feedback,” a Meta spokesman told WSJ.
“Given that this call was specifically for advertisers, obviously it was focused on topics they care about, like the suite of brand-safety tools we’ve offered them for years.”
Earlier this year, Meta CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg announced that it would be replacing its third-party fact checkers in the US with an X-style Community Notes feature that aims to “dramatically reduce the amount of censorship” on its platforms.
In a video, Meta boss Zuckerberg said that Facebook and Instagram would prioritise free speech and that third-party fact checkers “had become too politically biased and destroyed more trust than they created”.
Meta’s global affairs chief Joe Kaplan said in a blog post that Meta had “seen this approach work on X”, adding: “We think this could be a better way of achieving our original intention of providing people with information about what they’re seeing—and one that’s less prone to bias.”
There is currently no plan to introduce the change to Australia.
A Meta spokesperson told B&T previously: “We are beginning with rolling out Community Notes in the US, and will continue to improve it over the course of the year before considering expansion to other countries. Before rolling out any changes to our fact checking program outside the US, we will carefully consider our legal and regulatory obligations in each country, including Australia.”
“Today, many, if not all of our tier one, two and three advertisers have long-term relationships with Meta. If these changes impact the user experience, drives people away or changes the makeup of who stays on platform, our clients will be asking whether or not a long-term relationship with Meta is right,” said one media planner on condition of anonymity.
“When you bucket this in with the age-gating legislation and other challenges, advertisers will now be thinking about where Meta fits in their media mix.”
