What the end of Meta’s moderation means
📆 Today is Friday, January 17th. There’s only one other Friday the 17th in 2025, happening in October. Issue #248: moderation, small language models, David Lynch, and post-death password sharing
Meta’s announcement last week that they were gutting their fact-checking efforts and changing their approach to moderation on their platforms caught people by surprise. Meta (and Mark Zuckerberg’s) framing for the changes was about free speech; technology and social media scholar Danah Boyd sees the move as one that simply puts more of Meta’s users in harm’s way (warning: strong language in there). “This isn’t about free speech,” she writes on Medium. “It’s about allowing some people to harm others through vitriol — and providing the tools of amplification to help them.”
Moderation and Trust & Safety teams exist at tech companies for myriad reasons, but prime among them is keeping their users safe — or at least, that used to be the case. As Ryan Broderick points out in Garbage Day, Meta giving up means that their “social networks will immediately fill up with hatred and harassment…. but Meta is betting that the average user won’t care or notice.”
