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9 min read T&S Insider

The ethical and practical flaws in Meta's policy overhaul

Yes, Meta's recent policy overhaul says a lot about the company's priorities, leadership and strategic direction. But it's also a badly written and confusing policy. And the problem with bad policies is that they are very hard to enforce correctly.

I'm Alice Hunsberger. Trust & Safety Insider is my weekly rundown on the topics, industry trends and workplace strategies that trust and safety professionals need to know about to do their job.

This week, I'm all fired up about Meta's changes to their hate speech policies and content moderation enforcement (if you've been following me on social media I'm sure you've noticed).

If you're based in London and haven't already signed up for the EiM meetup at the end of January, what are you waiting for?! I'm sad I won't be able to make this one but perhaps next time

Get in touch and let me know what you've been thinking about this week. Here we go! — Alice

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A giant step backward in enforcement and user safety

Why this matters: Meta's recent policy overhaul says a lot about the company's priorities, leadership and strategic direction. But, more than that, the widened definition of 'hate speech' be difficult to consistently enforce and risks harming marginalised communities even more than currently thought.

There’s a lot I could say about last week’s Meta announcement (EiM #276), but my mind immediately went to the two things I know the best: policy and operations. Despite thousands of articles dissecting the now infamous five-minute video, I don’t feel these two aspects were covered enough. 

There are three aspects in particular that I’m most concerned about:

  1. The policy changes are about creating exceptions for the specific types of hate speech that the President-elect and a specific wing of the Republican party cares about, while still disallowing other, similar expressions. This tells us very clearly what Meta values (or rather doesn’t value).
  2. These changes are going to be almost impossible to enforce correctly, given the confusing and contradictory guidance. They feel hastily put together and incomplete.
  3. For many categories of policy violations, including hate speech, Meta is pivoting to a strategy that relies solely on user reports to send content to moderation review. I cannot say this strongly enough: this approach does not work.

I’ll go through each of these in more detail below. And I’d love to hear your thoughts — get in touch by hitting reply and I’ll look to round up EiM contributions next week.

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Published by:

Alice Hunsberger

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