• by Maarten Albarda , Featured Contributor, January 17, 2025

A lot has been written and said following Meta’s turnabout on moderation. Depending on where you sit on the political spectrum it is either really bad or really good news. I am not going to judge your assessment of Zuck’s move, but instead want to address an issue that both sides drag into the conversation, and that is the importance of free speech.

Freedom of speech in America is a fundamental right and having it should not be taken lightly. Many governments actively ensure it is not available to its citizens. Having this right allows us to agree or disagree with Meta’s decisions and policies.

It is this very right that is often mentioned when people explain why they are in favor of removing social media content moderation. They say that moderation is inherently biased because moderators are biased. They say that moderation blocks certain points of view because they are not in line with what the moderator believes.

If an AI determines a post to be offensive or misleading, it does so because it is trained to detect certain words, expressions or context. It is a machine passing an unemotional judgement against a set of criteria. If that judgement is subsequently reviewed by a human, it’s really hard for that person to completely ignore their personal feelings. If a post states that the Democratic party will outlaw stay-at-home moms, that post probably gets flagged. A moderator might agree that this is clearly nonsense.

But in the new Metaverse, this post would be allowed. If the system works as Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk say it will, in the new world of “liberated” social media, it might get a label from some attention-paying citizen. That person would have to show why the post is nonsense. But because this post is posted a hundred times by a foreign bot farm, the number of unlabeled posts that will reach the population will be far larger than the one flagged post.

That example is probably not that serious. But what if the post said that consuming Campbell’s Soup is the main reason for erectile dysfunction? Or that Citibank facilitates bank payments for a bloodthirsty vampire network? If it is someone’s belief that any of this is true, then Meta (and X) are fine with someone posting it.

It should go without saying that harmful content of any kind should be stopped. As a society, we all know showing porn to underage children, or being disrespectful to your mother, is wrong. We self-moderate for these extremes as a society, and we all adhere to certain norms and rules. These norms are not in conflict with freedom of speech, and in day-to-day life people are not seeking to change them. Yet, when they go online, they feel like they should be able to say that women are a man’s property, or that certain groups are less human, or worse.

There is no place for this kind of “free speech” on a commercially driven platform. The role of that platform is to deliver an advertiser-friendly environment that ensures marketers and advertisers happily allocate budget to that platform. I have a hard time understanding the benefit of courting the new king in Washington D.C. in the name of “free speech” while potentially damaging the most profitable part of your revenue stream.