Should you delete your Meta accounts?

Mark Zuckerberg has been on a media tour this week explaining some dramatic changes that Meta will be making to the way it moderates content across all of its different platforms.
His core message has been that Meta has always been about giving people an opportunity to share and connect with each other freely, and that Meta has moved too far in the direction of censorship, so he’s correcting that by removing content moderation altogether.
In its place, Meta will now use Community Notes, much like the ones found on X (Twitter) where users bear the responsibility of calling out posts that are incorrect, misleading, or otherwise inappropriate.
This is a really big deal, so today I want to give you the information you need to be prepared for what’s coming to Facebook, Instagram, and other Meta properties. If you have people in your life who may be less chronically online and who could benefit from this, then please hit the forward button and pass this info along to them.
What’s changing?
As of right now, Meta uses a combination of complex algorithms, AI, and large teams of content moderators to proactively seek out posts that contain hate speech, harassment, and/or misinformation, among other harmful things.
Over the next few months, Meta will limit that moderation only to what Zuckerberg describes as the worst of that “bad stuff,” ie. drug trafficking, terrorism, and child exploitation.
In its place, they will be delegating the responsibility of reviewing content for hate speech, bullying, etc. to us, the users. When the community agrees that a post needs correction or context, then a note will be added to the original post. Zuckerberg claims that this is a good thing because it will allow for more free and open expression across social media.
Now, I’m all for free speech, but it’s important to remember that unchecked content on Meta’s platforms has led to some horrendous outcomes, including an attempted genocide of the Rohingya people in Myanmar, and violence targeted at religious groups in India. In both of those cases (and many more), the content that Facebook’s algorithm chose to elevate and distribute was the most hateful and often completely made up posts.
The content moderation work that has been happening on Facebook was largely in response to these tragedies and others like it.
Does content moderation make mistakes? Absolutely, and in his interviews this week, Zuck talked extensively about the balance between catching every piece of harmful content and reducing the number of mistakes where content gets taken down that shouldn’t have.
But Meta has chosen the nuclear option, effectively washing their hands of any responsibility for what goes on in their newsfeeds and shoving that responsibility onto the users.
They are also reversing their stance on political content. For the past several years, any organic content that was deemed to be political in nature was welcome on the platforms, but was not actively promoted by the algorithms. Now, politics are back on the table.
What to Expect
If you’ve been spending any time on X recently, you can see what’s coming. Twitter always had its problems, but today it is a hellscape of fight videos, hate speech, porn, and unchecked personal attacks.
But that’s not what I’m most concerned about.
Accounts that are looking to incite distrust, division, and disinformation are about to have open season on Meta’s platforms.
Any bad actor who is motivated to create the type of content that would get people angry at each other, breed conspiracy theories, or bully groups of people now has a hall pass from the very top of Meta to post, share, and spread their garbage at will.
What can we do about it?
The best defense is a clear understanding of what we’re looking at when we open up our social media accounts.
When we understand how these algorithms are incentivized to promote content that enrages us in order to drive engagement, we are able to look more critically at the posts that are served to us.
When we know that there is literally no vetting process or accountability to truth in what we’re seeing, we have a better opportunity to pause for a second and ask ourselves whether that headline is accurate, or whether we should check another source to verify it.
Should we all delete our Meta accounts?
I’ll just say that’s a personal choice, but it’s worth noting that Google Trends has identified an over 5000% increase for searches like “how to delete all photos facebook,” “alternative to facebook,” “how to quit facebook,” “how to delete threads account,” and “how to delete instagram account without logging in.” (Source: TechCrunch)
The reality is that most people aren’t about to walk away from Facebook and Instagram, so here’s a simple system that we can all use to protect ourselves while scrolling.
Any time you see a post that makes you angry, shocks you with new information, or claims that a certain group of people are to blame for a major issue, consider the following:
- Do I trust the account that posted this?
- Is it possible that this account has an incentive to get a reaction from me?
- If I do a quick Google search, can I find any sources I trust that are saying the same thing?
- Is this post hateful, harmful, or deceptive? If so, hit the report button, because without it, no one at Meta is going to be paying attention.
For us as businesses, Meta properties will continue to be a massive opportunity for posting, engaging, and advertising so I don’t expect to see the same type of brand exodus that we saw on X. However, it is important that we all understand the context in which our content is about to start appearing.
Finally, if you’re reading this, you are probably already more aware that most people of how these platforms serve up your content, so it’s our responsibility to spread that knowledge to as many people as possible so that we can all make informed decisions for ourselves.
I’ve included a list of the sources I used to inform myself about this topic below. If you want to go deeper, these are great places to start:
- @Zuck on IG: “It’s time to get back to our roots on free expression”
- Meta Newsroom: More speech and fewer mistakes
- Platformer: Meta surrenders to the right on speech
- The Verge: The fallout of Meta’s content moderation overhaul
- New York Times: Meet the next fact-checker, moderator, and debunker: you
- Joe Rogan Experience: Mark Zuckerberg
Note: I don’t typically look to Rogan as my source for factual information, but in this case I thought that it was important to hear directly from Zuckerberg, so yes, I listened to the whole 3-hour podcast.