10 Jan 2025 | News and features, United States
Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement this week of changes to Meta’s content moderation policies appeared to primarily be about building trust. Trust among users. Trust among investors. And trust among the incoming Trump administration. “It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression,” Zuckerberg said in his announcement.
While we applaud anything that is generally trying to embolden free expression, will these moves actually do that? We break it down –
Fact-checking
In the USA, Meta is abandoning the use of independent fact checkers on its platforms (Facebook, Instagram and Threads) and replacing them with X-style “community notes”, where commenting on the accuracy or veracity of posts is left to users. But fact checks by dedicated fact-checking organisations do not work against free expression. As a rule they do not remove, override or stifle existing content. Instead they challenge it and contextualise it. As tech expert Mike Masnick wrote after the announcement: “Fact-checking is the epitome of “more speech”— exactly what the marketplace of ideas demands. By caving to those who want to silence fact-checkers, Meta is revealing how hollow its free speech rhetoric really is.”
On the flipside, as Masnick also points out, professional fact checkers are not always effective. The “people who wanted to believe false things weren’t being convinced by a fact check (and, indeed, started to falsely claim that fact checkers themselves were ‘biased’),” he writes. The notion of “bias” was referenced by Zuckerberg himself, who accused fact-checkers of this.
No fact-checker should be biased, although this is difficult to control. Many fact-checkers have taken issue with Zuckerberg’s assertion that they could be biased. Full Fact, who are part of Meta’s fact-checking programme, said that they “absolutely refute Meta’s charge of bias – we are strictly impartial, fact check claims from all political stripes with equal rigour, and hold those in power to account through our commitment to truth.”
While the set-up that existed until now has been imperfect, are proposed community notes any better? This is complicated. and there is little evidence to suggest they work to the extent that Zuckerberg claims. Community notes tend to be effective for issues on which there is consensus, because there must be agreement before a note can be added to a post. This means that misleading posts on politically divisive subjects often go unchecked, while some accurate posts can be flagged as untrue if enough people determine it that way. According to MediaWise, a media literacy programme at the Poynter Institute, only about 4% of drafted community notes about abortion and 6% of those on immigration were made public on X.
There is also a big difference between those who are paid (and qualified) to fact-check versus non-professionals and this can be evident in the very logistics. According to X, “in the first few days of the Israel-Hamas conflict, notes appeared at a median time of just five hours after posts were created.” In the online world, where a post can go viral within minutes, hours is a long time, arguably too long.
Content moderation
In addition to getting rid of dedicated fact-checkers, Meta is dialling back its content moderation teams and reducing reliance on filters. The move away from automated content moderation processes is to be welcomed. Due to the complexity of speech and online content sharing – with languages and communities evolving slang, colloquialisms and specific terminology – and the ambiguity over imagery, automated processes do not retain the contextual details or complexity necessary to make consistent and informed decisions.
Mis- and disinformation are problematic standards for content removal too. For instance, satire is commonly presented as fact when obviously false and this a central tenet of protected speech across the globe. Simply removing all posts that are deemed to contain misinformation is not and has not worked.
What is more, censoring misinformation does not address the root cause; removing fake news only temporarily silences those that spread it. It doesn’t demonstrate why the information they are spreading is inaccurate. It may even end up giving conspiracy theorists more reason to believe in their theories by feeling that they are being denied access to information. It can end up undermining trust.
Content moderation isn’t just about removing perceived or real misinformation. It is also about removing posts that propagate hate and/or incite violence. Like with misinformation these have to date been imperfectly applied – sweeping up legal speech and missing illegal speech. Algorithms are ultimately imperfect. They miss nuance and this has had a negative impact on speech across Meta platforms.
It is right for Meta to review these policies as they have too often, to date, failed the free speech test.
Still, in scaling filters back – rather than addressing how to improve them – it does run the risk of allowing a lot more bad content in. Zuckerberg, by his own admission, says that the newly introduced measures are “a “trade-off”. “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.”
The flipside of catching “less bad stuff” can be, ironically, less free speech. Harassment can drive people to silence themselves or leave online spaces entirely. This form of censorship (self-censorship) is insidious and cannot be easily measured. Unchecked it can also lead to some of the gravest attacks onto human rights. In 2022 Amnesty issued a report looking into Meta’s role in the Rohingya genocide. It detailed “how Meta knew or should have known that Facebook’s algorithmic systems were supercharging the spread of harmful anti-Rohingya content in Myanmar, but the company still failed to act”.
Following Zuckerberg’s announcement, Helle Thorning-Schmidt, from Meta’s oversight board, said: “We are seeing many instances where hate speech can lead to real-life harm.” She raised concerns about the potential impact on the LGBTQ+ community as just one community.
Another damning response came from Maria Ressa, Rappler CEO and Nobel Peace Prize winner:
“Journalists have a set of standards and ethics. What Facebook is going to do is get rid of that and then allow lies, anger, fear and hate to infect every single person on the platform.”
Finally, Zuckerberg said the remaining content moderation teams will be moved from California to Texas where, he said, “there is less concern about the bias of our teams”. As pointed out by many, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, there is no evidence that Texas is less biased than California. Due to the political leadership of Texas and the positioning of this state and the perception that it is more closely allied with the incoming administration, there are real concerns that this is replacing one set of perceived biases with another. Instead, a free-speech first approach would be to address what biases exist and how current teams can overcome them, irrespective of geographical location. Establishing a process based on international human rights and free expression standards would be a step in the right direction.
Hateful conduct policy
In Zuckerberg’s announcement he stated “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.”
Simplifying the policies can increase their efficacy, with users clearer as to the standards employed on the platforms. However, suggesting that policies must move with “mainstream discourse” is a challenging threshold to maintain and could embed uncertainty into how Meta responds to the ever-changing and complex speech environment. Identifying topics such as immigration and gender threatens to define such thresholds by the contentious topics of the day and not objective standards or principles for free expression.
It could also open the floodgates to a lot of genuine hate speech and incitement, which will be incredibly damaging for many individuals and communities – in general and in terms of free speech.
Foreign interference
In Zuckerberg’s speech he took issue with foreign interference. Platforms and governments have often collided over their interpretations of what is acceptable content and who has the power to decide. Ideally we’d have standardised community guidelines and rules of moderation in line with international human rights law. In practise this is not the case. Except instead of highlighting countries where the human rights record is woeful and content removal requests have been clearly politically motivated, Zuckerberg cited Latin America and Europe here. Article19 said they were “puzzled by Mark Zuckerberg’s assertion that Europe has enacted an ‘ever-increasing number of laws institutionalizing censorship’” and that it showed “misunderstanding”.
Parking a discussion of EU laws, it was certainly disappointing for the reasons stated above. As reported by the Carnegie Center in 2024: “In illiberal and/or autocratic contexts, from Türkiye to Vietnam, governments have exploited the international debate over platform regulation to coerce tech companies to censor—rather than moderate—content.” That is where we need to be having a conversation.
Countries such as India have demonstrated processes by which political pressure can be exerted over content moderation decisions undertaken by social media platforms. According to the Washington Post, the Indian government has expanded its pressure on X: “Where officials had once asked for a handful of tweets to be removed at each meeting, they now insisted that entire accounts be taken down, and numbers were running in the hundreds. Executives who refused the government’s demands could now be jailed, their companies expelled from the Indian market.” Further in the piece, it states: “Records published by the Indian Parliament show that annual takedown requests for posts and accounts increased from 471 to 6,775 between 2014 and 2022, with those to Twitter soaring from 224 in 2018 to 3,417 in 2022.”
Zuckerberg’s announcement was silent on how Meta would respond to or resist such explicit state censorship in countries with weak and eroding democratic norms and standards.
Final thoughts
For now Meta says it has “no immediate plans” to get rid of its third-party fact checkers in the UK or the EU, nor could it necessarily do so because of the legal landscape. Some countries also have outright bans on Meta’s platforms, like China. So this is a story that will play out primarily in the USA.
Still, it is part of a broader pattern of Silicon Valley executives misusing the label “free speech” and the timing of it suggests the motivation is for political gain. Even incoming president Donald Trump acknowledged that this week. The shift towards kowtowing to one party and one person, which we have seen occur on other platforms, is incredibly worrying. As Emily Maitlis said on the News Agents this week when evaluating the announcement: “There is a king on the top here and there are courtiers and they recognise that their position is in terms of how they respond to the king now”.
Whether the platforms are used for sharing pictures of your family or galvanising support for a campaign, we know the powerful and central role social media plays in our lives. Furthermore, according to a 2022 OECD report, around four out of 10 respondents said they did not trust the news media, and more and more people were turning to social media for their news, especially young people. As a result it’s essential that social media lands in a helpful place. Content moderation policies at scale are incredibly difficult and cumbersome. They are impossible to do perfectly and easy to do badly. Still, we have little faith that these changes will be helpful and concerns that they could be hurtful.
We will continue to monitor the situation closely. In the meantime, please do support organisations like Index who are genuinely dedicated to the fight against censorship and the fight for free expression.
6 Jan 2025 | Europe and Central Asia, France
This week, 7 January 2025 marks exactly ten years since the Charlie Hebdo attacks, when Islamist gunmen stormed the satirical magazine’s Paris editorial office and killed 11 people over cartoons of the Prophet Muhammed. A month after the attack, the Turkish writer Elif Shafak wrote for us on the increasingly divisive world in which we live, and the urgent need to differentiate between the right to be offended and the right to commit violence. Ten years on, with the proliferation of fractious rhetoric on social media, her words seem more poignant than ever. To mark the anniversary of the tragedy, we have republished Shafak’s piece below. It was originally published online on 12 March 2015, and in print in Volume 44, Issue 1 of Index on Censorship. Charlie Hebdo has also produced a special edition to mark ten years, which you can read more about here.
After the horrific attacks against the French satirical journal Charlie Hebdo and a Jewish supermarket in Paris, the world has turned into a Tower of Babel where there are too many languages spoken but too little, if any, real communication. Ever since those three days of terror in France, across the globe there has been more anger than sorrow, more emotional backlash than rational analysis, and more confusion than insight.
As heartwarming as it was to see millions of Parisians march against religious extremism and countless others show their solidarity via hashtags and messages on social media, we cannot ignore the fact that a rather disturbing cognitive gap is opening up between different parts of the world and different segments of humanity. Even in the face of atrocity, humankind is failing to speak the same language.
Among the political leaders who marched in Paris there were quite a few with a lamentable human rights curriculum vitae. While Saudi Arabia was quick to send a representative to France, the regime did not shy away from publicly lashing Raif Badawi, a liberal blogger, for his views. Israel, Russia and Egypt, among others, have been criticised for their double standards at home and abroad. Turkey, my motherland, has a shocking number of journalists and cartoonists either in prison or facing trial.
No doubt, the most moving response to the act of brutality came from cartoonists across the globe. With powerful images and few words they showed their unflinching support for freedom of expression. But those of us who cannot draw, and therefore must talk or write have done a poor job in general. With every aggrandising remark the cognitive gap widened.
Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy claimed: “This is a war declared on civilization.” Soon after, the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan announced: “French citizens carry out such a massacre, and Muslims pay a price.” He then added: “Games are being played with the Islamic world, we need to be aware of this.” Such statements only served to increase conspiracy theories, which abound throughout the Middle East. Meanwhile journalists, academics and writers lampooned each other. The response to a book is another book.
So far, the language over Charlie Hebdo has been more divisive than unifying. Even the usage of conjunctions is a problem. After the tragedy, a top-level politician in Turkey tweeted that it was wrong to kill journalists, but they should not have mocked Islamic values. Never had the word “but” disturbed me so much.
The controversy had important echoes inside Turkey. The secularist newspaper Cumhuriyet wrote a powerful statement, saying that having lost some of their own writers to terrorism in the past, they understood so well the pain of the Charlie Hebdo killings. But the AKP government was of a different mind. The prime minister said printing the cartoons would be considered “heavy sedition” and they would not allow anyone to insult the Prophet. Accordingly, a court order was issued to prohibit access to Turkish websites that insisted in publishing Charlie Hebdo’s recent cover.
In response, independent news website T24 openly defied the court ban and published the entire issue of the magazine. And people kept spreading the cover via their Twitter and Facebook accounts. It was interesting to see how many of these reactions came from people who were already tired of the AKP government’s restrictive attitudes towards freedom of speech. As always, Turkey’s social media operated as a political platform. Over the years as media freedoms shrunk visibly, the social media became more and more politicised.
Every journalist, every poet, every novelist in Turkey knows words carry a heavy weight, and they can get you in trouble. We know that only too well that because of a poem, an article, a novel, or even a tweet we can be sued, put on trial, demonised, even imprisoned. When we write, we write with this knowledge at the back of our minds. As a result there is a lot of silent self-censorship. Yet we find it rather difficult to talk about this subject, mostly because it is embarrassing.
As a Turkish writer both freedom of speech and freedom of imagination are precious to me. When I travel in Muslim-majority countries I often hear people saying “I am offended, don’t I have a right to be?” Yet I believe we are making a grave mistake by focusing on the word “offence”, and questioning whether art can be offensive or people have a right to be offended. We are stuck in a mental trap as long as we cannot manage to discuss violence and offence separately.
We need to divorce the two notions. It is perfectly human to be offended in the face of mockery, opprobrium or slander. That is understandable. Hindus, Jews, Muslims, Christians or agnostics, we can all feel offended by something someone says, writes or does. But that is where the line must be drawn. What is inhuman and unacceptable is to resort to violence and shed blood in response.
The response to a book is another book. The response to an article is writing a counter-article. The response to cartoons is more cartoons, not fewer. Words need to be answered with words. This simple equation is what we have failed to teach to both the younger generations and ourselves.
Let’s be clear: this is not a clash of civilizations. It is not even a battle of religions. Yet it is a clash, and a deepening one, between two mindsets. The real chasm is between those of us who believe in pluralistic democracy, culture of co-existence and the value of diversity and cosmopolitanism, and those who have chosen to divide humanity into mutually exclusive camps: us versus them. It is a cognitive clash therefore.
As Sufis have been saying throughout the centuries, we are all profoundly interconnected. Globalism has way too often been interpreted as an economic and political phenomenon. Yet it also means that our futures, our stories and our destinies are interconnected. The unhappiness of someone living in Pakistan affects the happiness of someone living in Belgium or Australia. We must understand that in this complex web of relations any divisive rhetoric is bound to create more of the same.
Extremism somewhere breeds extremism elsewhere. Islamophobia spawns anti-Westernism and anti-Westernism spawns Islamophobia. A far-right racist in Germany might regard a Taliban man in Pakistan as his arch-enemy but in fact, they are kindred spirits. They share surprisingly similar narrow mindsets. And what’s more, they need each other to exist and to thrive.
We need to get out of the vicious circle of division and hatred before it engulfs us all. Together we must stand and speak up for pluralistic democracy and harmonious coexistence. At the same time, however, now is the time to think about the response we have given to the tragedy calmly and carefully. In this response lie the hidden important clues to our strengths and weaknesses as fellow human beings and the sharpest dilemmas that will continue to beset the world in the 21st century.
3 Jan 2025 | Iran, Israel, Middle East and North Africa, News and features, Syria, Turkey
Three days before the start of the battle to oust Bashar al-Assad, a Syrian political figure I trust for his insights and analysis called me. With my 18 years of experience in journalism, his words carried weight to me. “The Assad era is officially over in Syria,” he declared.
Wael al-Khalidi, the leading Syrian opposition figure, told me: “We will return to Syria. Be certain that the moment the revolutionaries enter Aleppo, they will advance to every Syrian city, and Assad will fall.”
Hearing such news, and thinking about reporting it to the world, was monumental for me. It was 11pm on 7 December when the Syrian revolutionaries began entering Damascus. Personally, I was physically exhausted from days of sleepless work covering the rebels’ advances against Assad’s regime, but their proximity to Damascus gave me renewed strength.
I will never forget the historic moment when I posted on Facebook at 1.30am on 8 December: “Al-Assad has fled, Syrians!” I believe I was the first to break this news, ahead of any major media outlet in the world.
At that moment, I remembered my father, who was killed by the Syrian regime in 2012 when an airstrike hit our home. My father was an elderly, unarmed man. Overwhelmed with emotion, I wept with joy as the dictator Bashar Al-Assad fell. These feelings are indescribable, known only to Syrians who have endured 54 years of suffering under this regime, deprived of the simplest rights and subjected to all forms of killing.
In Syria, journalism was limited to writing only about the leader’s achievements. Criticism was forbidden, and one had to be a member of the Ba’ath Party to speak about accomplishments of both the party and its leader.
When the Syrian revolution began, I worked as an editor for a magazine focused on entertainment news. Frequently meeting with Syrian artists, I found myself in a real predicament: how could we praise Bashar al-Assad while innocent blood was being shed in the streets? I decided to leave journalism and work at a local food restaurant. Later, I fled Damascus for my hometown, Idlib, where I resumed journalism, documenting the violations committed by the Syrian regime and other factions during that period.
Unfortunately, at the time, the jihadist group Jabhat Al-Nusra sought to impose its control on Idlib by force. My writings criticising them openly led to my imprisonment by them. Later, they demanded I leave the country, so I fled to Turkey and continued my journalistic work.
In Turkey, journalism was relatively safe until certain restrictions began to emerge. Suddenly, I was arrested, accused of producing reports critical of Iran’s actions in Syria, with allegations that Israel was funding me. My time in Turkish prison felt absurd to both me and my defence attorney: reporting news is not espionage. The charge was collaborating with Israel against Iran in Syria: a regrettable accusation. I emphasised during my trial that I viewed Iran, Hezbollah, the Assad regime, and Israel as criminals. Eventually, I was acquitted.
Today, Syria faces a challenging phase requiring the media to play its role as the voice of people long silenced under a one-sided dictatorial narrative. We need free, independent Syrian media that competes with major global outlets. It’s not impossible.
Sadly, even weeks after the fall of the Syrian regime, there is a noticeable absence of an official Syrian media outlet addressing the Syrian audience. The country faces media chaos, where outlets and social media influencers depict events irresponsibly and unethically.
Syria needs more workshops to train journalists on professional ethics and innovative approaches, breaking away from the norms imposed for decades.
I am planning to take a significant risk: returning to Syria to launch an independent media project. This initiative aims to amplify the voices of people, addressing their concerns and struggles through a team of young Syrian men and women who believe in a free, independent Syria that respects its neighbours and the global community.
It is a big gamble, and I am fully aware of the dangers of returning to my country after a decade of absence. But with the risks, I carry dreams of finally writing freely in a liberated homeland.
19 Dec 2024 | News and features, Newsletters
Hello, readers. This will be our final newsletter before Index wraps up for the holiday season. It’s been quite the year for freedom of expression, and whilst it’s not easy to summarise in one email, we’ve had a go. We’ve seen severe violations by repressive governments – but we’ve also seen remarkable acts of defiance by political activists, journalists and protesters.
These acts of defiance leave room for hope. In Russia, the year started with the suspicious death of Alexei Navalny whilst in detention, arguably Vladimir Putin’s most vocal critic (you can read an obituary by journalist John Sweeney here). But it was then punctuated with the release of opposition leader Vladimir Kara-Murza in a prisoner swap in August, after relentless campaigning led by his wife, Evgenia, who we ultimately awarded in this year’s Freedom of Expression Awards.
Another huge win for international protest was the release of Iranian political activist Toomaj Salehi in December, following his death sentence being overturned in June. Of course, there are many activists who remain behind bars and Index will continue to campaign for their release. Dozens of pro-democracy campaigners in Hong Kong – the Hong Kong 47 – were given harsh prison sentences of between four and 10 years in November, whilst prominent Chinese #MeToo activist (and previous Index award winner) Sophia Huang Xueqin was sentenced to five years in June. British-Egyptian political activist Alaa Abd el-Fattah was also denied freedom, even after serving his five-year jail term.
Throughout the year, we’ve seen media workers and independent reporting targeted in the most pernicious ways, including through targeted murder, particularly in war zones such as Gaza. Palestine has now become the most dangerous place to be a journalist, and you can read Al Jazeera English journalist Youmna El Sayed’s first-hand account on the risks of covering the conflict here. Meanwhile, media workers in Sudan face similar threats and persecution with seldom international attention, in what has been described as the “forgotten war”.
Alongside the brave pursuits of journalists, regular citizens have also stood up to their governments – with varying degrees of success. Alleged fraudulent elections in Georgia, Mozambique and Venezuela have caused the public to take to the streets in defiance of corruption. Whilst peaceful protests have resulted in violent crackdowns, there is cause for hope: a citizen-led democratic activism project in Venezuela was used to capture accurate voting tallies, and could prove to be a blueprint for fighting election fraud globally in the future, reported Martin Bright. And who could forget South Korea’s “no worries if not!” moment – when president Yoon Suk Yeol’s attempt at enforcing martial law was shut down within six hours thanks to mass assembly.
As we approach 2025, an uncertain future awaits. Repressive laws in Afghanistan have caused it to become the world’s most silenced nation, particularly for women, who under terrifying Taliban morality laws can no longer speak in public. Next year, will the international community stand up for women in the country and rally against what human rights groups are calling “gender apartheid”?
In the USA, a second Trump presidency could also bring with it a chilling impact on free expression, particularly for minority groups. You can read Emma Briant’s fascinating piece on the potential effect on university free thought in the “Land of Liberty” here. Meanwhile, the overthrowing of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s repressive regime means thousands of political dissidents have been liberated from the dictator’s inhumane prisons – but what could a future rebel-run regime really mean for the country’s freedoms?
We’ll be back in January. In the meantime, do make sure you read our latest magazine issue, Unsung Heroes: How musicians are raising their voices against oppression. If you’d like to subscribe, we have a special offer running until 3 January – you can enjoy 30% off an annual digital subscription by using the discount code Winter24 at checkout here, meaning it costs just £12.60.
Wishing you all a restful break, and hopefully a brighter 2025.
