Free Speech is Back: Zuckerberg’s Big Move

00:00 - Hey, everyone. I want to talk about something 
important today because it's time to get back to   our roots around free expression on Facebook and 
Instagram. I started building social media to give   people a voice. I gave a speech at Georgetown five 
years ago about the importance of protecting free   expression. And I still believe this today, but 
a lot has happened over the last several years. There's been widespread debate about potential 
harms from online content. Governments and legacy  
00:26 - media have pushed to censor more and more. A 
lot of this is clearly political, but there's   also a lot of legitimately bad stuff out there: 
drugs, terrorism, child exploitation. These are   things that we take very seriously, and I want 
to make sure that we handle them responsibly. So 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  
00:53 - people. And we've reached a point where it's just 
too many mistakes and too much censorship. The   recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping 
point towards once again prioritizing speech. So we're going to get back to our 
roots and focus on reducing mistakes,   simplifying our policies, and restoring free 
expression on our platforms. More specifically,   here's what we're going to do. First, we're going 
to get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with  
01:19 - community notes similar to X. Starting in the 
U.S. after Trump first got elected in 2016,   the legacy media wrote nonstop about how 
misinformation was a threat to democracy. We tried in good faith to address those 
concerns without becoming the arbiters   of truth. But the fact-checkers have just been 
too politically biased and have destroyed more   trust than they've created, especially in 
the U.S. So over the next couple of months,  
01:46 - we're going to phase in a more comprehensive 
community note system. Second, we're going   to simplify our content policies and get 
rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics   like immigration and gender that are just 
out of touch with mainstream discourse. What started as a movement to be more inclusive 
has increasingly been used to shut down opinions   and shut out people with different ideas. 
And it's gone too far. So I want to make  
02:10 - sure that people can share their beliefs 
and experiences on our platforms. Third,   we're changing how we enforce our 
policies to reduce the mistakes   that account for the vast majority 
of censorship on our platforms. We used to have filters that scanned for any 
policy violation. Now we're going to focus those   filters on tackling illegal and high-severity 
violations. And for lower-severity violations,  
02:35 - we're going to rely on someone reporting an 
issue before we take action. The problem is   that the filters make mistakes, and they take 
down a lot of content that they shouldn't. So by dialing them back, we're going 
to dramatically reduce the amount of   censorship on our platform. We're also going 
to tune our content filters to require much   higher confidence before taking down 
content. The reality is that this is  
02:58 - a tradeoff. It means we're going to 
catch less bad stuff, but we'll also   reduce the number of innocent people's posts 
and accounts that we accidentally take down. Fourth, we're bringing back civic content. 
For a while, the community saw less politics   because it was making people stressed. 
So we stopped recommending these posts.   But it feels like we're in a new era now, and 
we're starting to get feedback that people want  
03:22 - to see this content again. So we're going 
to start phasing this back into Facebook,   Instagram, and Threads while working to 
keep the communities friendly and positive. Fifth, we're going to move our trust and safety 
and content moderation teams out of California,   and our U.S.-based content review 
is going to be based in Texas. As   we work to promote free expression, 
I think that will help us build trust  
03:46 - to do this work in places where there is 
less concern about the bias of our teams. Finally, we're going to work with President 
Trump to push back on governments around the   world. They're going after American companies and 
pushing to censor more. The U.S. has the strongest   constitutional protections for free expression in 
the world. Europe has an ever-increasing number   of laws institutionalizing censorship and making 
it difficult to build anything innovative there.  
04:13 - Latin American countries have secret courts that 
can order companies to quietly take things down. China has censored our apps from even working 
in the country. The only way that we can push   back on this global trend is with the support of 
the U.S. government. And that's why it's been so   difficult over the past four years, when even the 
U.S. government has pushed for censorship by going   after U.S. and other American companies. It has 
emboldened other governments to go even further.
04:42 - But now we have the opportunity 
to restore free expression,   and I am excited to take it. It'll take time to 
get this right, and these are complex systems.   They're never going to be perfect. There's 
also a lot of illegal stuff that we still   need to work very hard to remove. But 
the bottom line is that after years of   having our content moderation work focused 
primarily on removing content, it is time  
05:05 - to focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying 
our systems, and getting back to our roots. About giving people voice. I'm looking forward   to this next chapter. Stay good 
out there, and more to come soon.