Meta acknowledged Tuesday that "harmless content" was too often removed from its social media platforms during election season, infringing on "the free expression we set out to enable."
The parent company of Facebook and Instagram shared a report Tuesday saying their error rates were "too high" when enforcing content moderation policies.
"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. Too often harmless content gets taken down or restricted and too many people get penalized unfairly," Meta President of Global Affairs Nick Clegg wrote. "We will continue to work on this in the months ahead."
In a call with reporters Monday, Clegg also said Meta regrets the number of posts it removed during the COVID-19 pandemic, censorship efforts that CEO Mark Zuckerberg told Congress in August his company was pressured into doing by the Biden administration.
"We had very stringent rules removing very large volumes of content through the pandemic," Clegg said, according to 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 a letter to the House Judiciary Committee dated Aug. 26, Zuckerberg said he regretted not surfacing sooner the pressure to censor from the Biden administration.
"In 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn't agree," Zuckerberg wrote.
It came out days later that Rob Flaherty, who transitioned to deputy campaign manager for Vice President Kamala Harris' presidential campaign, was the point person in the Biden White House who directed the digital censorship of conservative opposition.
Mark Swanson ✉
Mark Swanson, a Newsmax writer and editor, has nearly three decades of experience covering news, culture and politics.
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