Meta's president of global affairs said the company regrets censoring conservative media, including the aggressive removal of posts which ran counter to the Biden administration's Covid narrative.
Nick Clegg told reporters on Monday that the company’s moderation “error rates are still too high” and pledged to “improve the precision and accuracy with which we act on our rules.”
“Too often, harmless content gets taken down, or restricted, and too many people get penalized unfairly,” Clegg said.
Such an apology does not recoup losses suffered by independent media such as FreePressers.com as the result of such censorship tactics.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently told the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee the decision to censor Covid reporting was influenced by pressure from the Biden administration.
“We had very stringent rules removing very large volumes of content through the pandemic,” Clegg said. “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. We’re acutely aware because users quite rightly raised their voice and complained that we sometimes over-enforce and we make mistakes and we remove or restrict innocuous or innocent content.”
Meta publicly apologized after its systems suppressed photos of Donald Trump surviving an attempted assassination. And its own Oversight Board recently warned ahead of the U.S. presidential election that its moderation errors risk the “excessive removal of political speech.”
Asked by TheVerge.com about Zuckerberg’s dinner with Trump last week at Mar-a-Lago and if Meta still planned to resist government pressure to moderate, as Zuckerberg told the House Judiciary Committee, Clegg sidestepped the question:
“I can’t give you a running commentary on conversations I was not part of. The administration is still being assembled and the inauguration has not happened, so the conversations at this stage are clearly fairly high level. Mark is very keen to play an active role in the debates that any administration needs to have about maintaining America’s leadership in the technological sphere, which, of course, is tremendously important given all the geostrategic uncertainties around the world and particularly the pivotal role that AI will play in that scenario.”
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