Social-media firms decide content moderation is trending down

Social-media companies never wanted to aggressively police content on their platforms. Now, they are deciding they don't have to anymore.

- Alexa Corse, Meghan Bobrowsky & Jeff Horwitz

Social-media giants away from refereeing what is said on their platforms. Trump ally Elon Musk led the charge starting in 2022, when he acquired the platform then known as Twitter and slashed content-policy jobs and loosened content restrictions.

In 2023, YouTube and Meta halted policies that had curbed claims of widespread fraud in the 2020 U.S. presidential election, and Meta has cut spending on trust and safety efforts as part of Zuckerberg's efforts to enhance efficiency.

Such efforts are scaling back policies and operations that have involved tens of thousands of staffers and contractors and billions of dollars in aggregate costs—and that alienated the conservatives who are set to control both houses of Congress as well as the White House.

"These platforms are realizing that if they want to have a role in where tech policy is going to go over the next four years, this is the game they've got to play," said Katie Harbath, a Republican and former Facebook public-policy director who has advocated for more guardrails around social media.

Zuckerberg acknowledged in his announcement Tuesday that there is "a lot of legitimately bad stuff out there," including terrorism and child exploitation, which they'll continue to take down.

"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," he said.

Shrinking or dismantling fact-checking and content-moderation systems, though, risks upsetting other users, as well as some advertisers, politicians, and employees, by supercharging the kinds of hate speech and deliberately misleading information that compelled the companies to create those systems in the first place.