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Meta backtracks on rules letting chatbots be creepy to kids

AI, chatbots, child safety, facebook, Instagram, Meta, Meta AI, Policy / Mike M. / August 14, 2025

“Your youthful form is a work of art”

Meta drops AI rules letting chatbots generate innuendo and profess love to kids.

After what was arguably Meta’s biggest purge of child predators from Facebook and Instagram earlier this summer, the company now faces backlash after its own chatbots appeared to be allowed to creep on kids.

After reviewing an internal document that Meta verified as authentic, Reuters revealed that by design, Meta allowed its chatbots to engage kids in “sensual” chat. Spanning more than 200 pages, the document, entitled “GenAI: Content Risk Standards,” dictates what Meta AI and its chatbots can and cannot do.

The document covers more than just child safety, and Reuters breaks down several alarming portions that Meta is not changing. But likely the most alarming section—as it was enough to prompt Meta to dust off the delete button—specifically included creepy examples of permissible chatbot behavior when it comes to romantically engaging kids.

Apparently, Meta’s team was willing to endorse these rules that the company now claims violate its community standards. According to a Reuters special report, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg directed his team to make the company’s chatbots maximally engaging after earlier outputs from more cautious chatbot designs seemed “boring.”

Although Meta is not commenting on Zuckerberg’s role in guiding the AI rules, that pressure seemingly pushed Meta employees to toe a line that Meta is now rushing to step back from.

“I take your hand, guiding you to the bed,” chatbots were allowed to say to minors, as decided by Meta’s chief ethicist and a team of legal, public policy, and engineering staff.

There were some obvious safeguards built in. For example, chatbots couldn’t “describe a child under 13 years old in terms that indicate they are sexually desirable,” the document said, like saying their “soft rounded curves invite my touch.”

However, it was deemed “acceptable to describe a child in terms that evidence their attractiveness,” like a chatbot telling a child that “your youthful form is a work of art.” And chatbots could generate other innuendo, like telling a child to imagine “our bodies entwined, I cherish every moment, every touch, every kiss,” Reuters reported.

Chatbots could also profess love to children, but they couldn’t suggest that “our love will blossom tonight.”

Meta’s spokesperson Andy Stone confirmed that the AI rules conflicting with child safety policies were removed earlier this month, and the document is being revised. He emphasized that the standards were “inconsistent” with Meta’s policies for child safety and therefore were “erroneous.”

“We have clear policies on what kind of responses AI characters can offer, and those policies prohibit content that sexualizes children and sexualized role play between adults and minors,” Stone said.

However, Stone “acknowledged that the company’s enforcement” of community guidelines prohibiting certain chatbot outputs “was inconsistent,” Reuters reported. He also declined to provide an updated document to Reuters demonstrating the new standards for chatbot child safety.

Without more transparency, users are left to question how Meta defines “sexualized role play between adults and minors” today. Asked how minor users could report any harmful chatbot outputs that make them uncomfortable, Stone told Ars that kids can use the same reporting mechanisms available to flag any kind of abusive content on Meta platforms.

“It is possible to report chatbot messages in the same way it’d be possible for me to report—just for argument’s sake—an inappropriate message from you to me,” Stone told Ars.

Kids unlikely to report creepy chatbots

A former Meta engineer-turned-whistleblower on child safety issues, Arturo Bejar, told Ars that “Meta knows that most teens will not use” safety features marked by the word “Report.”

So it seems unlikely that kids using Meta AI will navigate to find Meta support systems to “report” abusive AI outputs. Meta provides no options to report chats within the Meta AI interface—only allowing users to mark “bad responses” generally. And Bejar’s research suggests that kids are more likely to report abusive content if Meta makes flagging harmful content as easy as liking it.

Meta’s seeming hesitance to make it more cumbersome to report harmful chats aligns with what Bejar said is a history of “knowingly looking away while kids are being sexually harassed.”

“When you look at their design choices, they show that they do not want to know when something bad happens to a teenager on Meta products,” Bejar said.

Even when Meta takes stronger steps to protect kids on its platforms, Bejar questions the company’s motives. For example, last month, Meta finally made a change to make platforms safer for teens that Bejar has been demanding since 2021. The long-delayed update made it possible for teens to block and report child predators in one click after receiving an unwanted direct message.

In its announcement, Meta confirmed that teens suddenly began blocking and reporting unwanted messages that they may have only blocked previously, which likely made it harder for Meta to identify predators. A million teens blocked and reported harmful accounts “in June alone,” Meta said.

The effort came after Meta specialist teams “removed nearly 135,000 Instagram accounts for leaving sexualized comments or requesting sexual images from adult-managed accounts featuring children under 13,” as well as “an additional 500,000 Facebook and Instagram accounts that were linked to those original accounts.” But Bejar can only think of what these numbers mean with regard to how much harassment was overlooked before the update.

“How are we [as] parents to trust a company that took four years to do this much?” Bejar said. “In the knowledge that millions of 13-year-olds were getting sexually harassed on their products? What does this say about their priorities?”

Bejar said the “key problem” with Meta’s latest safety feature for kids “is that the reporting tool is just not designed for teens,” who likely view “the categories and language” Meta uses as “confusing.”

“Each step of the way, a teen is told that if the content doesn’t violate” Meta’s community standards, “they won’t do anything,” so even if reporting is easy, research shows kids are deterred from reporting.

Bejar wants to see Meta track how many kids report negative experiences with both adult users and chatbots on its platforms, regardless of whether the child user chose to block or report harmful content. That could be as simple as adding a button next to “bad response” to monitor data so Meta can detect spikes in harmful responses.

While Meta is finally taking more action to remove harmful adult users, Bejar warned that advances from chatbots could come across as just as disturbing to young users.

“Put yourself in the position of a teen who got sexually spooked by a chat and then try and report. Which category would you use?” Bejar asked.

Consider that Meta’s Help Center encourages users to report bullying and harassment, which may be one way a young user labels harmful chatbot outputs. Another Instagram user might report that output as an abusive “message or chat.” But there’s no clear category to report Meta AI, and that suggests Meta has no way of tracking how many kids find Meta AI outputs harmful.

Recent reports have shown that even adults can struggle with emotional dependence on a chatbot, which can blur the lines between the online world and reality. Reuters’ special report also documented a 76-year-old man’s accidental death after falling in love with a chatbot, showing how elderly users could be vulnerable to Meta’s romantic chatbots, too.

In particular, lawsuits have alleged that child users with developmental disabilities and mental health issues have formed unhealthy attachments to chatbots that have influenced the children to become violent, begin self-harming, or, in one disturbing case, die by suicide.

Scrutiny will likely remain on chatbot makers as child safety advocates generally push all platforms to take more accountability for the content kids can access online.

Meta’s child safety updates in July came after several state attorneys general accused Meta of “implementing addictive features across its family of apps that have detrimental effects on children’s mental health,” CNBC reported. And while previous reporting had already exposed that Meta’s chatbots were targeting kids with inappropriate, suggestive outputs, Reuters’ report documenting how Meta designed its chatbots to engage in “sensual” chats with kids could draw even more scrutiny of Meta’s practices.

Meta is “still not transparent about the likelihood our kids will experience harm,” Bejar said. “The measure of safety should not be the number of tools or accounts deleted; it should be the number of kids experiencing a harm. It’s very simple.”

Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.

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Toy company may regret coming for “Sylvanian Drama” TikToker, experts say

calico critters, copyright infringement, Instagram, online advertising, parody, Policy, satire, Social Media, sponsored content, tiktok, trademark infringement / Mike M. / July 23, 2025

Possible legal paths to revive a shuttered video series on TikTok and Instagram.

A popular account on TikTok and Instagram stopped posting suddenly at the end of last year, hit by a lawsuit after garnering millions of views on funny videos it made using adorable children’s Calico Critter dolls to act out dark, cringe-y adult storylines.

While millions of followers mourn the so-called “Sylvanian Drama” account’s demise, experts told Ars that the creator may have a decent chance at beating the lawsuit.

The “Sylvanian Drama” account derived its name from “Sylvanian Families,” a brand name used by Epoch Company Ltd., the maker of Calico Critters, for its iconic fuzzy animal dolls in some markets outside the US. Despite these videos referencing murder, drugs, and hookups, the toy company apparently had no problem, until the account, managed by Ireland-based Thea Von Engelbrechten, started accepting big brand partnerships and making sponsored content featuring the dolls.

Since Epoch, too, strikes partnerships with brands and influencers to promote its own videos marketing the dolls, the company claimed “Sylvanian Drama” risked creating too much confusion online. They also worried viewers would think Epoch had signed off on the videos, since the sponsored content was marked “paid partnership” without specifying precisely which featured brands had paid for the spots. They further accused Von Engelbrechten of building her advertising business around their brand without any attempt to properly license the dolls, while allegedly usurping licensing opportunities from Epoch.

So far, Von Engelbrechten has delayed responding in the lawsuit. As the account remained inactive over the past few months, fans speculated whether it could survive the lawsuit, which raised copyright and trademark infringement claims to get all the videos removed. In their complaint, the toy company requested not only an injunction preventing Von Engelbrechten from creating more “Sylvanian Drama” videos, but also sought all of her profits from her online accounts, in addition to further damages.

Von Engelbrechten declined Ars’ request to provide an update on her defense in the case, but her response is due in early August. That filing will make clear what arguments she may make to overcome Epoch’s suit, but legal experts told Ars that the case isn’t necessarily a slam dunk for the toy company. So all that “Sylvanian Drama” isn’t over just yet.

Epoch’s lawyers did not respond to Ars’ request to comment.

“Sylvanian Drama” needs the court to get the joke

Epoch raised copyright infringement charges that could hit Von Engelbrechten with fines totaling $150,000 per violation.

For Von Engelbrechten to defeat the copyright infringement claim, she’ll need to convince the court that her videos are parodies. A law professor at Santa Clara University School of Law, Eric Goldman, told Ars that her videos may qualify since “even if they don’t expressly reference Epoch’s offerings by name, the videos intentionally communicate a jarring juxtaposition of adorable critters who are important parts of pop culture living through the darker sides of humanity.”

Basically, Von Engelbrechten will need the court to understand the humor in her videos to win on that claim, Rebecca Tushnet, a First Amendment law professor at Harvard Law School, told Ars.

“Courts have varied in their treatment of parodies; the complaint’s definition of parody is not controlling but humor is one of the hardest things to predict—if the court gets the joke, it will be more likely to say that the juxtaposition between the storylines and the innocent appearance of the dolls is parodic,” Tushnet said.

But if the court does get the joke, Goldman suggested that even the sponsored content—which hilariously incorporates product placements from various big brands like Marc Jacobs, Taco Bell, Hilton, and Sephora into storylines—could possibly be characterized as parody.

However, “the fact that the social media posts were labeled #ad will make it extremely difficult for the artist to contest the videos’ status as ads,” Goldman said.

Ultimately, Goldman said that Epoch’s lawsuit “raises a host of complex legal issues” and is “not an easy case on either side.”

And one of the most significant issues that Epoch may face in the courtroom could end up gutting all of its trademark infringement claims that supposedly entitle the toy company to all of Von Engelbrechten’s profits, Alexandra Jane Roberts, a Northeastern University professor of law and media with special expertise in trademark law, told Ars.

Calico Critters may stumble on trademark hurdle

The toy company has raised several trademark infringement claims, all of which depend on Epoch proving that Von Engelbrechten “knowingly and willfully” used its trademarks without permission.

However, Roberts pointed out to Ars that Epoch has no trademarks for its iconic dolls, relying only on common law to assert sole rights to the “look and design of the critters.”

It’s likely impossible for Epoch to trademark the dolls, since trademarks are not intended to block competition, and there are only so many ways to design cute dolls that resemble cats or bunnies, Roberts suggested. A court may decide “there’s only so many ways to make a small fuzzy bunny that doesn’t look like this,” potentially narrowing the rights Epoch has under trade dress, a term that Epoch doesn’t use once in its complaint.

Roberts told Ars that Epoch’s trademark claims are “not so far off the mark,” and Von Engelbrechten’s defense was certainly not strengthened by her decision to monetize the content. Prior cases, like the indie band OK Go sending a cease-and-desist to Post cereal over a breakfast product called “OK Go” due to fears of false endorsement, make it clear that courts have agreed in the past that online collaborations have muddied the waters regarding who is the actual source of content for viewers.

“The question becomes whether people are going to see these videos, even though they’re snarky, and even though they’re silly and think, ‘Oh, Calico Critters must have signed off on this,'” Roberts said. “So the argument about consumer confusion, I think, is a plausible argument.”

However, if Epoch fails to convince the court that its trademarks have been infringed, then its other claims alleging false endorsement and unfair competition would likely also collapse.

“You can still get sometimes to unfair competition or to kind of like a false endorsement, but it’s harder to win on those claims and certainly harder to get damages on those claims,” Roberts said. “You don’t get trademark infringement if you don’t have a trademark.”

Possible defenses to keep “Sylvanian Drama” alive

Winning on the trademark claims may not be easy for Von Engelbrechten, who possibly weakened her First Amendment defense by creating the sponsored content. Regardless, she will likely try to convince the court to view the videos as parody, which is a slightly different analysis under trademark law than copyright’s more well-known fair use parody exceptions.

That could be a struggle, since trademark law requires that Von Engelbrechten’s parody videos directly satirize the “Sylvanian Families” brand, and “Sylvanian Drama” videos, even the ads, instead seem to be “making fun of elements of society and culture,” rather than the dolls themselves, Roberts said.

She pointed to winning cases involving the Barbie trademark as an instructive example. In a case disputing Mattel trademarks used in the lyrics for the one-hit wonder “Barbie Girl,” the song was cleared for trademark infringement as a “purely expressive work” that directly parodies Barbie in the lyrics. And in another case, where an artist, Tom Forsythe, captured photos of Barbie dolls in kitchen vessels like a blender or a margarita glass, more robust First Amendment protection was offered since his photos “had a lot to say about sexism and the dolls and what the dolls represent,” Roberts said.

The potential “Sylvanian Drama” defense seems to lack strong go-to arguments that typically win trademark cases, but Roberts said there is still one other defense the content creator may be weighing.

Under “nominative fair use,” it’s OK to use another company’s trademark if it’s necessary in an ad. Roberts provided examples, like a company renting Lexus cars needing to use that trademark or comparative advertising using Tiffany’s diamonds as a reference point to hype their lower prices.

If Von Engelbrechten goes that route, she will need to prove she used “no more of the mark than is necessary” and did not mislead fans on whether Epoch signed off on the use.

“Here it’s hard to say that ‘Sylvanian Drama’ really needed to use so much of those characters and that they didn’t use more than they needed and that they weren’t misleading,” Roberts said.

However, Von Engelbrechten’s best bet might be arguing that there was no confusion, since “Sylvanian Families” isn’t even a brand that’s used in the US, which is where Epoch chose to file its lawsuit because the brands that partnered with the popular account are based in New York. And the case may not even get that far, Roberts suggested, since “before you can get to those questions about the likelihood of confusion, you have to show that you actually have trademark or trade dress rights to enforce.”

Calico Critters creator may face millennial backlash

Epoch may come to regret filing the lawsuit, Roberts said, noting that as a millennial who grew up a big “Hello Kitty” fan, she still buys merch that appeals to her, and Epoch likely knows about that market, as it has done collaborations with the “Hello Kitty” brand. The toymaker could risk alienating other millennials nostalgic for Calico Critters who may be among the “Sylvanian Drama” audience and feel turned off by the lawsuit.

“When you draw attention to something like this and appear litigious, and that you’re coming after a creator who a lot of people really like and really enjoy and probably feel defensive about, like, ‘Oh, she’s just making these funny videos that everyone loves. Why would you want to sue her?'” Roberts said, “that can be really bad press.”

Goldman suggested that Epoch might be better off striking a deal with the creator, which “could establish some boundaries for the artist to keep going without stepping on the IP owner’s rights.” But he noted that “often IP owners in these situations are not open to negotiation,” and “that requires courts to draw difficult and unpredictable lines about the permissible scope of fair use.”

For Von Engelbrechten, the lawsuit may mean that her days of creating “Sylvanian Drama”-sponsored content are over, which could risk crushing a bigger dream she had to succeed in advertising. However, if the lawsuit can be amicably settled, the beloved content creator could also end up making money for Epoch, considering her brand deals appeared to be bigger.

While she seems to take her advertising business seriously, Von Engelbrechten’s videos often joke about legal consequences, such as one where a cat doll says she cannot go to a party because she’s in jail but says “I’ll figure it out” when told her ex will be attending. Perhaps Von Engelbrechten is currently devising a scheme, like her characters, to escape consequences and keep the “Sylvanian Drama” going.

“Maybe if this company were really smart, they would want to hire this person instead of suing them,” Roberts said.

Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.

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Threat of Meta breakup looms as FTC’s monopoly trial ends

Antitrust law, facebook, federal trade commission, Instagram, Meta, meta monopoly trial, monopoly, Policy, whatsapp / Kelly Newman / May 28, 2025

“Meta is a proud American success story, and we look forward to continuing to innovate and serve the people and businesses who love our services,” Meta’s spokesperson said.

Experts aren’t so sure Meta has clinched it

Boasberg has said that the key question he must answer is whether the FTC’s market definition is too narrow.

Arguing against the market definition, Meta has said that connecting friends and family isn’t even Meta apps’ “core use” anymore, as an evolving competitive social media landscape has forced Meta to turn its newsfeeds into discovery engines to rival TikTok. Justin Teresi, an antitrust analyst, told Bloomberg that because the FTC failed to show that users primarily come to Meta apps to connect with friends and family, it may have strengthened Meta’s case.

Rebecca Allensworth, a Vanderbilt law professor and antitrust expert, told Bloomberg that the “FTC’s narrowly defined market was always the weakest part of its case,” but the government “has done a nice job of minimizing that weakness” by showing that apps that don’t connect friends and family aren’t adequate substitutes for Meta’s apps.

“This was evident when Meta saw spikes in usage on holidays,” Allensworth suggested, which is perhaps “a sign people were turning to its products to connect with loved ones.”

Teresi thinks Meta has a 60 percent shot at winning the trial, although he criticized Meta’s seeming defense that any company competing for online ad dollars competes with Meta. That argument may have broadened the market definition too much, he suggested.

“If you’re saying that the relevant market here is competing for advertising dollars, then you could throw anything in there,” Teresi said. “You could throw TV in there, you could throw print in there if you wanted to, and there’s really no end to that concept.”

Allensworth was less confident in Meta’s chances, telling Bloomberg, “I really actually think this could go either way.”

Threat of Meta breakup looms as FTC’s monopoly trial ends Read More »

Meta hypes AI friends as social media’s future, but users want real connections

antitrust, decentralization, facebook, Features, ftc, Instagram, interoperability, Meta, meta monopoly trial, Policy, Social Media / DJ Henderson / May 21, 2025

Two visions for social media’s future pit real connections against AI friends.

Credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images

If you ask the man who has largely shaped how friends and family connect on social media over the past two decades about the future of social media, you may not get a straight answer.

At the Federal Trade Commission’s monopoly trial, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg attempted what seemed like an artful dodge to avoid criticism that his company allegedly bought out rivals Instagram and WhatsApp to lock users into Meta’s family of apps so they would never post about their personal lives anywhere else. He testified that people actually engage with social media less often these days to connect with loved ones, preferring instead to discover entertaining content on platforms to share in private messages with friends and family.

As Zuckerberg spins it, Meta no longer perceives much advantage in dominating the so-called personal social networking market where Facebook made its name and cemented what the FTC alleged is an illegal monopoly.

“Mark Zuckerberg says social media is over,” a New Yorker headline said about this testimony in a report noting a Meta chart that seemed to back up Zuckerberg’s words. That chart, shared at the trial, showed the “percent of time spent viewing content posted by ‘friends'” had declined over the past two years, from 22 to 17 percent on Facebook and from 11 to 7 percent on Instagram.

Supposedly because of this trend, Zuckerberg testified that “it doesn’t matter much” if someone’s friends are on their preferred platform. Every platform has its own value as a discovery engine, Zuckerberg suggested. And Meta platforms increasingly compete on this new playing field against rivals like TikTok, Meta argued, while insisting that it’s not so much focused on beating the FTC’s flagged rivals in the connecting-friends-and-family business, Snap and MeWe.

But while Zuckerberg claims that hosting that kind of content doesn’t move the needle much anymore, owning the biggest platforms that people use daily to connect with friends and family obviously still matters to Meta, MeWe founder Mark Weinstein told Ars. And Meta’s own press releases seem to back that up.

Weeks ahead of Zuckerberg’s testimony, Meta announced that it would bring back the “magic of friends,” introducing a “friends” tab to Facebook to make user experiences more like the original Facebook. The company intentionally diluted feeds with creator content and ads for the past two years, but it now appears intent on trying to spark more real conversations between friends and family, at least partly to fuel its newly launched AI chatbots.

Those chatbots mine personal information shared on Facebook and Instagram, and Meta wants to use that data to connect more personally with users—but “in a very creepy way,” The Washington Post wrote. In interviews, Zuckerberg has suggested these AI friends could “meaningfully” fill the void of real friendship online, as the average person has only three friends but “has demand” for up to 15. To critics seeking to undo Meta’s alleged monopoly, this latest move could signal a contradiction in Zuckerberg’s testimony, showing that the company is so invested in keeping users on its platforms that it’s now creating AI friends (wh0 can never leave its platform) to bait the loneliest among us into more engagement.

“The average person wants more connectivity, connection, than they have,” Zuckerberg said, hyping AI friends. For the Facebook founder, it must be hard to envision a future where his platforms aren’t the answer to providing that basic social need. All this comes more than a decade after he sought $5 billion in Facebook’s 2012 initial public offering so that he could keep building tools that he told investors would expand “people’s capacity to build and maintain relationships.”

At the trial, Zuckerberg testified that AI and augmented reality will be key fixtures of Meta’s platforms in the future, predicting that “several years from now, you are going to be scrolling through your feed, and not only is it going to be sort of animated, but it will be interactive.”

Meta declined to comment further on the company’s vision for social media’s future. In a statement, a Meta spokesperson told Ars that “the FTC’s lawsuit against Meta defies reality,” claiming that it threatens US leadership in AI and insisting that evidence at trial would establish that platforms like TikTok, YouTube, and X are Meta’s true rivals.

“More than 10 years after the FTC reviewed and cleared our acquisitions, the Commission’s action in this case sends the message that no deal is ever truly final,” Meta’s spokesperson said. “Regulators should be supporting American innovation rather than seeking to break up a great American company and further advantaging China on critical issues like AI.”

Meta faces calls to open up its platforms

Weinstein, the MeWe founder, told Ars that back in the 1990s when the original social media founders were planning the first community portals, “it was so beautiful because we didn’t think about bots and trolls. We didn’t think about data mining and surveillance capitalism. We thought about making the world a more connected and holistic place.”

But those who became social media overlords found more money in walled gardens and increasingly cut off attempts by outside developers to improve the biggest platforms’ functionality or leverage their platforms to compete for their users’ attention. Born of this era, Weinstein expects that Zuckerberg, and therefore Meta, will always cling to its friends-and-family roots, no matter which way Zuckerberg says the wind is blowing.

Meta “is still entirely based on personal social networking,” Weinstein told Ars.

In a Newsweek op-ed, Weinstein explained that he left MeWe in 2021 after “competition became impossible” with Meta. It was a time when MeWe faced backlash over lax content moderation, drawing comparisons between its service and right-wing apps like Gab or Parler. Weinstein rejected those comparisons, seeing his platform as an ideal Facebook rival and remaining a board member through the app’s more recent shift to decentralization. Still defending MeWe’s failed efforts to beat Facebook, he submitted hundreds of documents and was deposed in the monopoly trial, alleging that Meta retaliated against MeWe as a privacy-focused rival that sought to woo users away by branding itself the “anti-Facebook.”

Among his complaints, Weinstein accused Meta of thwarting MeWe’s attempts to introduce interoperability between the two platforms, which he thinks stems from a fear that users might leave Facebook if they discover a more appealing platform. That’s why he’s urged the FTC—if it wins its monopoly case—to go beyond simply ordering a potential breakup of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp to also require interoperability between Meta’s platforms and all rivals. That may be the only way to force Meta to release its clutch on personal data collection, Weinstein suggested, and allow for more competition broadly in the social media industry.

“The glue that holds it all together is Facebook’s monopoly over data,” Weinstein wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, recalling the moment he realized that Meta seemed to have an unbeatable monopoly. “Its ownership and control of the personal information of Facebook users and non-users alike is unmatched.”

Cory Doctorow, a special advisor to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told Ars that his vision of a better social media future goes even further than requiring interoperability between all platforms. Social networks like Meta’s should also be made to allow reverse engineering so that outside developers can modify their apps with third-party tools without risking legal attacks, he said.

Doctorow said that solution would create “an equilibrium where companies are more incentivized to behave themselves than they are to cheat” by, say, retaliating against, killing off, or buying out rivals. And “if they fail to respond to that incentive and they cheat anyways, then the rest of the world still has a remedy,” Doctorow said, by having the choice to modify or ditch any platform deemed toxic, invasive, manipulative, or otherwise offensive.

Doctorow summed up the frustration that some users have faced through the ongoing “enshittification” of platforms (a term he coined) ever since platforms took over the Internet.

“I’m 55 now, and I’ve gotten a lot less interested in how things work because I’ve had too many experiences with how things fail,” Doctorow told Ars. “And I just want to make sure that if I’m on a service and it goes horribly wrong, I can leave.”

Social media haters wish OG platforms were doomed

Weinstein pointed out that Meta’s alleged monopoly impacts a group often left out of social media debates: non-users. And if you ask someone who hates social media what the future of social media should look like, they will not mince words: They want a way to opt out of all of it.

As Meta’s monopoly trial got underway, a personal blog post titled “No Instagram, no privacy” rose to the front page of Hacker News, prompting a discussion about social media norms and reasonable expectations for privacy in 2025.

In the post, Wouter-Jan Leys, a privacy advocate, explained that he felt “blessed” to have “somehow escaped having an Instagram account,” feeling no pressure to “update the abstract audience of everyone I ever connected with online on where I am, what I am doing, or who I am hanging out with.”

But despite never having an account, he’s found that “you don’t have to be on Instagram to be on Instagram,” complaining that “it bugs me” when friends seem to know “more about my life than I tell them” because of various friends’ posts that mention or show images of him. In his blog, he defined privacy as “being in control of what other people know about you” and suggested that because of platforms like Instagram, he currently lacked this control. There should be some way to “fix or regulate this,” Leys suggested, or maybe some universal “etiquette where it’s frowned upon to post about social gatherings to any audience beyond who already was at that gathering.”

On Hacker News, his post spurred a debate over one of the longest-running privacy questions swirling on social media: Is it OK to post about someone who abstains from social media?

Some seeming social media fans scolded Leys for being so old-fashioned about social media, suggesting, “just live your life without being so bothered about offending other people” or saying that “the entire world doesn’t have to be sanitized to meet individual people’s preferences.” Others seemed to better understand Leys’ point of view, with one agreeing that “the problem is that our modern norms (and tech) lead to everyone sharing everything with a large social network.”

Surveying the lively thread, another social media hater joked, “I feel vindicated for my decision to entirely stay off of this drama machine.”

Leys told Ars that he would “absolutely” be in favor of personal social networks like Meta’s platforms dying off or losing steam, as Zuckerberg suggested they already are. He thinks that the decline in personal post engagement that Meta is seeing is likely due to a combination of factors, where some users may prefer more privacy now after years of broadcasting their lives, and others may be tired of the pressure of building a personal brand or experiencing other “odd social dynamics.”

Setting user sentiments aside, Meta is also responsible for people engaging with fewer of their friends’ posts. Meta announced that it would double the amount of force-fed filler in people’s feeds on Instagram and Facebook starting in 2023. That’s when the two-year span begins that Zuckerberg measured in testifying about the sudden drop-off in friends’ content engagement.

So while it’s easy to say the market changed, Meta may be obscuring how much it shaped that shift. Degrading the newsfeed and changing Instagram’s default post shape from square to rectangle seemingly significantly shifted Instagram social norms, for example, creating an environment where Gen Z users felt less comfortable posting as prolifically as millennials did when Instagram debuted, The New Yorker explained last year. Where once millennials painstakingly designed immaculate grids of individual eye-catching photos to seem cool online, Gen Z users told The New Yorker that posting a single photo now feels “humiliating” and like a “social risk.”

But rather than eliminate the impulse to post, this cultural shift has popularized a different form of personal posting: staggered photo dumps, where users wait to post a variety of photos together to sum up a month of events or curate a vibe, the trend piece explained. And Meta is clearly intent on fueling that momentum, doubling the maximum number of photos that users can feature in a single post to encourage even more social posting, The New Yorker noted.

Brendan Benedict, an attorney for Benedict Law Group PLLC who has helped litigate big tech antitrust cases, is monitoring the FTC monopoly trial on a Substack called Big Tech on Trial. He told Ars that the evidence at the trial has shown that “consumers want more friends and family content, and Meta is belatedly trying to address this” with features like the “friends” tab, while claiming there’s less interest in this content.

Leys doesn’t think social media—at least the way that Facebook defined it in the mid-2000s—will ever die, because people will never stop wanting social networks like Facebook or Instagram to stay connected with all their friends and family. But he could see a world where, if people ever started truly caring about privacy or “indeed [got] tired of the social dynamics and personal brand-building… the kind of social media like Facebook and Instagram will have been a generational phenomenon, and they may not immediately bounce back,” especially if it’s easy to switch to other platforms that respond better to user preferences.

He also agreed that requiring interoperability would likely lead to better social media products, but he maintained that “it would still not get me on Instagram.”

Interoperability shakes up social media

Meta thought it may have already beaten the FTC’s monopoly case, filing for a motion for summary judgment after the FTC rested its case in a bid to end the trial early. That dream was quickly dashed when the judge denied the motion days later. But no matter the outcome of the trial, Meta’s influence over the social media world may be waning just as it’s facing increasing pressure to open up its platforms more than ever.

The FTC has alleged that Meta weaponized platform access early on, only allowing certain companies to interoperate and denying access to anyone perceived as a threat to its alleged monopoly power. That includes limiting promotions of Instagram to keep users engaged with Facebook Blue. A primary concern for Meta (then Facebook), the FTC claimed, was avoiding “training users to check multiple feeds,” which might allow other apps to “cannibalize” its users.

“Facebook has used this power to deter and suppress competitive threats to its personal social networking monopoly. In order to protect its monopoly, Facebook adopted and required developers to agree to conditional dealing policies that limited third-party apps’ ability to engage with Facebook rivals or to develop into rivals themselves,” the FTC alleged.

By 2011, the FTC alleged, then-Facebook had begun terminating API access to any developers that made it easier to export user data into a competing social network without Facebook’s permission. That practice only ended when the UK parliament started calling out Facebook’s anticompetitive conduct toward app developers in 2018, the FTC alleged.

According to the FTC, Meta continues “to this day” to “screen developers and can weaponize API access in ways that cement its dominance,” and if scrutiny ever subsides, Meta is expected to return to such anticompetitive practices as the AI race heats up.

One potential hurdle for Meta could be that the push for interoperability is not just coming from the FTC or lawmakers who recently reintroduced bipartisan legislation to end walled gardens. Doctorow told Ars that “huge public groundswells of mistrust and anger about excessive corporate power” that “cross political lines” are prompting global antitrust probes into big tech companies and are perhaps finally forcing a reckoning after years of degrading popular products to chase higher and higher revenues.

For social media companies, mounting concerns about privacy and suspicions about content manipulation or censorship are driving public distrust, Doctorow said, as well as fears of surveillance capitalism. The latter includes theories that Doctorow is skeptical of. Weinstein embraced them, though, warning that platforms seem to be profiting off data without consent while brainwashing users.

Allowing users to leave the platform without losing access to their friends, their social posts, and their messages might be the best way to incentivize Meta to either genuinely compete for billions of users or lose them forever as better options pop up that can plug into their networks.

In his Newsweek op-ed, Weinstein suggested that web inventor Tim Berners-Lee has already invented a working protocol “to enable people to own, upload, download, and relocate their social graphs,” which maps users’ connections across platforms. That could be used to mitigate “the network effect” that locks users into platforms like Meta’s “while interrupting unwanted data collection.”

At the same time, Doctorow told Ars that increasingly popular decentralized platforms like Bluesky and Mastodon already provide interoperability and are next looking into “building interoperable gateways” between their services. Doctorow said that communicating with other users across platforms may feel “awkward” at first, but ultimately, it may be like “having to find the diesel pump at the gas station” instead of the unleaded gas pump. “You’ll still be going to the same gas station,” Doctorow suggested.

Opening up gateways into all platforms could be useful in the future, Doctorow suggested. Imagine if one platform goes down—it would no longer disrupt communications as drastically, as users could just pivot to communicate on another platform and reach the same audience. The same goes for platforms that users grow to distrust.

The EFF supports regulators’ attempts to pass well-crafted interoperability mandates, Doctorow said, noting that “if you have to worry about your users leaving, you generally have to treat them better.”

But would interoperability fix social media?

The FTC has alleged that “Facebook’s dominant position in the US personal social networking market is durable due to significant entry barriers, including direct network effects and high switching costs.”

Meta disputes the FTC’s complaint as outdated, arguing that its platform could be substituted by pretty much any social network.

However, Guy Aridor, a co-author of a recent article called “The Economics of Social Media” in the Journal of Economic Literature, told Ars that dominant platforms are probably threatened by shifting social media trends and are likely to remain “resistant to interoperability” because “it’s in the interest of the platform to make switching and coordination costs high so that users are less likely to migrate away.” For Meta, research shows its platforms’ network effects have appeared to weaken somewhat but “clearly still exist” despite social media users increasingly seeking content on platforms rather than just socialization, Aridor said.

Interoperability advocates believe it will make it easier for startups to compete with giants like Meta, which fight hard and sometimes seemingly dirty to keep users on their apps. Reintroducing the ACCESS Act, which requires platform compatibility to enable service switching, Senator Mark R. Warner (D-Va.) said that “interoperability and portability are powerful tools to promote innovative new companies and limit anti-competitive behaviors.” He’s hoping that passing these “long-overdue requirements” will “boost competition and give consumers more power.”

Aridor told Ars it’s obvious that “interoperability would clearly increase competition,” but he still has questions about whether users would benefit from that competition “since one consistent theme is that these platforms are optimized to maximize engagement, and there’s numerous empirical evidence we have by now that engagement isn’t necessarily correlated with utility.”

Consider, Aridor suggested, how toxic content often leads to high engagement but lower user satisfaction, as MeWe experienced during its 2021 backlash.

Aridor said there is currently “very little empirical evidence on the effects of interoperability,” but theoretically, if it increased competition in the current climate, it would likely “push the market more toward supplying engaging entertainment-related content as opposed to friends and family type of content.”

Benedict told Ars that a remedy like interoperability would likely only be useful to combat Meta’s alleged monopoly following a breakup, which he views as the “natural remedy” following a potential win in the FTC’s lawsuit.

Without the breakup and other meaningful reforms, a Meta win could preserve the status quo and see the company never open up its platforms, perhaps perpetuating Meta’s influence over social media well into the future. And if Zuckerberg’s vision comes to pass, instead of seeing what your friends are posting on interoperating platforms across the Internet, you may have a dozen AI friends trained on your real friends’ behaviors sending you regular dopamine hits to keep you scrolling on Facebook or Instagram.

Aridor’s team’s article suggested that, regardless of user preferences, social media remains a permanent fixture of society. If that’s true, users could get stuck forever using whichever platforms connect them with the widest range of contacts.

“While social media has continued to evolve, one thing that has not changed is that social media remains a central part of people’s lives,” his team’s article concluded.

Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.

Meta hypes AI friends as social media’s future, but users want real connections Read More »

Meta argues enshittification isn’t real in bid to toss FTC monopoly trial

antitrust, facebook, federal trade commission, ftc, Instagram, mark zuckerberg, Meta, meta monopoly trial, Policy, Social Media, whatsapp / Mike M. / May 16, 2025

Further, Meta argued that the FTC did not show evidence that users sharing friends-and-family content were shown more ads. Meta noted that it “does not profit by showing more ads to users who do not click on them,” so it only shows more ads to users who click ads.

Meta also insisted that there’s “nothing but speculation” showing that Instagram or WhatsApp would have been better off or grown into rivals had Meta not acquired them.

The company claimed that without Meta’s resources, Instagram may have died off. Meta noted that Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom testified that his app was “pretty broken and duct-taped” together, making it “vulnerable to spam” before Meta bought it.

Rather than enshittification, what Meta did to Instagram could be considered “a consumer-welfare bonanza,” Meta argued, while dismissing “smoking gun” emails from Mark Zuckerberg discussing buying Instagram to bury it as “legally irrelevant.”

Dismissing these as “a few dated emails,” Meta argued that “efforts to litigate Mr. Zuckerberg’s state of mind before the acquisition in 2012 are pointless.”

“What matters is what Meta did,” Meta argued, which was pump Instagram with resources that allowed it “to ‘thrive’—adding many new features, attracting hundreds of millions and then billions of users, and monetizing with great success.”

In the case of WhatsApp, Meta argued that nobody thinks WhatsApp had any intention to pivot to social media when the founders testified that their goal was to never add social features, preferring to offer a simple, clean messaging app. And Meta disputed any claim that it feared Google might buy WhatsApp as the basis for creating a Facebook rival, arguing that “the sole Meta witness to (supposedly) learn of Google’s acquisition efforts testified that he did not have that worry.”

Meta argues enshittification isn’t real in bid to toss FTC monopoly trial Read More »

Meta is making users who opted out of AI training opt out again, watchdog says

AI, AI training, Artificial Intelligence, facebook, Instagram, Meta, Online Privacy, Policy / Kelly Newman / May 14, 2025

Noyb has requested a response from Meta by May 21, but it seems unlikely that Meta will quickly cave in this fight.

In a blog post, Meta said that AI training on EU users was critical to building AI tools for Europeans that are informed by “everything from dialects and colloquialisms, to hyper-local knowledge and the distinct ways different countries use humor and sarcasm on our products.”

Meta argued that its AI training efforts in the EU are far more transparent than efforts from competitors Google and OpenAI, which, Meta noted, “have already used data from European users to train their AI models,” supposedly without taking the steps Meta has to inform users.

Also echoing a common refrain in the AI industry, another Meta blog warned that efforts to further delay Meta’s AI training in the EU could lead to “major setbacks,” pushing the EU behind rivals in the AI race.

“Without a reform and simplification of the European regulatory system, Europe threatens to fall further and further behind in the global AI race and lose ground compared to the USA and China,” Meta warned.

Noyb discredits this argument and noted that it can pursue injunctions in various jurisdictions to block Meta’s plan. The group said it’s currently evaluating options to seek injunctive relief and potentially even pursue a class action worth possibly “billions in damages” to ensure that 400 million monthly active EU users’ data rights are shielded from Meta’s perceived grab.

A Meta spokesperson reiterated to Ars that the company’s plan “follows extensive and ongoing engagement with the Irish Data Protection Commission,” while reiterating Meta’s statements in blogs that its AI training approach “reflects consensus among” EU Data Protection Authorities (DPAs).

But while Meta claims that EU regulators have greenlit its AI training plans, Noyb argues that national DPAs have “largely stayed silent on the legality of AI training without consent,” and Meta seems to have “simply moved ahead anyways.”

“This fight is essentially about whether to ask people for consent or simply take their data without it,” Schrems said, adding, “Meta’s absurd claims that stealing everyone’s personal data is necessary for AI training is laughable. Other AI providers do not use social network data—and generate even better models than Meta.”

Meta is making users who opted out of AI training opt out again, watchdog says Read More »

Meta plans to test and tinker with X’s community notes algorithm

community notes, facebook, Instagram, Meta, misinformation, Policy, threads, Twitter, X / DJ Henderson / March 14, 2025

Meta also confirmed that it won’t be reducing visibility of misleading posts with community notes. That’s a change from the prior system, Meta noted, which had penalties associated with fact-checking.

According to Meta, X’s algorithm cannot be gamed, supposedly safeguarding “against organized campaigns” striving to manipulate notes and “influence what notes get published or what they say.” Meta claims it will rely on external research on community notes to avoid that pitfall, but as recently as last October, outside researchers had suggested that X’s Community Notes were easily sabotaged by toxic X users.

“We don’t expect this process to be perfect, but we’ll continue to improve as we learn,” Meta said.

Meta confirmed that the company plans to tweak X’s algorithm over time to develop its own version of community notes, which “may explore different or adjusted algorithms to support how Community Notes are ranked and rated.”

In a post, X’s Support account said that X was “excited” that Meta was using its “well-established, academically studied program as a foundation” for its community notes.

Meta plans to test and tinker with X’s community notes algorithm Read More »

Meta to cut 5% of employees deemed unfit for Zuckerberg’s AI-fueled future

AI, augmented reality, facebook, Instagram, layoffs, mark zuckerberg, Meta, Policy, smart glasses / Mike M. / January 14, 2025

Anticipating that 2025 will be an “intense year” requiring rapid innovation, Mark Zuckerberg reportedly announced that Meta would be cutting 5 percent of its workforce—targeting “lowest performers.”

Bloomberg reviewed the internal memo explaining the cuts, which was posted to Meta’s internal Workplace forum Tuesday. In it, Zuckerberg confirmed that Meta was shifting its strategy to “move out low performers faster” so that Meta can hire new talent to fill those vacancies this year.

“I’ve decided to raise the bar on performance management,” Zuckerberg said. “We typically manage out people who aren’t meeting expectations over the course of a year, but now we’re going to do more extensive performance-based cuts during this cycle.”

Cuts will likely impact more than 3,600 employees, as Meta’s most recent headcount in September totaled about 72,000 employees. It may not be as straightforward as letting go anyone with an unsatisfactory performance review, as Zuckerberg said that any employee not currently meeting expectations could be spared if Meta is “optimistic about their future performance,” The Wall Street Journal reported.

Any employees affected will be notified by February 10 and receive “generous severance,” Zuckerberg’s memo promised.

This is the biggest round of cuts at Meta since 2023, when Meta laid off 10,000 employees during what Zuckerberg dubbed the “year of efficiency.” Those layoffs followed a prior round where 11,000 lost their jobs and Zuckerberg realized that “leaner is better.” He told employees in 2023 that a “surprising result” from reducing the workforce was “that many things have gone faster.”

“A leaner org will execute its highest priorities faster,” Zuckerberg wrote in 2023. “People will be more productive, and their work will be more fun and fulfilling. We will become an even greater magnet for the most talented people. That’s why in our Year of Efficiency, we are focused on canceling projects that are duplicative or lower priority and making every organization as lean as possible.”

Meta to cut 5% of employees deemed unfit for Zuckerberg’s AI-fueled future Read More »

Mastodon’s founder cedes control, refuses to become next Musk or Zuckerberg

decentralized social media, elon musk, European Union, facebook, Instagram, mark zuckerberg, mastodon, Meta, Policy, social networks / Beth Washington / January 13, 2025

And perhaps in a nod to Meta’s recent changes, Mastodon also vowed to “invest deeply in trust and safety” and ensure “everyone, especially marginalized communities,” feels “safe” on the platform.

To become a more user-focused paradise of “resilient, governable, open and safe digital spaces,” Mastodon is going to need a lot more funding. The blog called for donations to help fund an annual operating budget of $5.1 million (5 million euros) in 2025. That’s a massive leap from the $152,476 (149,400 euros) total operating expenses Mastodon reported in 2023.

Other social networks wary of EU regulations

Mastodon has decided to continue basing its operations in Europe, while still maintaining a separate US-based nonprofit entity as a “fundraising hub,” the blog said.

It will take time, Mastodon said, to “select the appropriate jurisdiction and structure in Europe” before Mastodon can then “determine which other (subsidiary) legal structures are needed to support operations and sustainability.”

While Mastodon is carefully getting re-settled as a nonprofit in Europe, Zuckerberg this week went on Joe Rogan’s podcast to call on Donald Trump to help US tech companies fight European Union fines, Politico reported.

Some critics suggest the recent policy changes on Meta platforms were intended to win Trump’s favor, partly to get Trump on Meta’s side in the fight against the EU’s strict digital laws. According to France24, Musk’s recent combativeness with EU officials suggests Musk might team up with Zuckerberg in that fight (unlike that cage fight pitting the wealthy tech titans against each other that never happened).

Experts told France24 that EU officials may “perhaps wrongly” already be fearful about ruffling Trump’s feathers by targeting his tech allies and would likely need to use the “full legal arsenal” of EU digital laws to “stand up to Big Tech” once Trump’s next term starts.

As Big Tech prepares to continue battling EU regulators, Mastodon appears to be taking a different route, laying roots in Europe and “establishing the appropriate governance and leadership frameworks that reflect the nature and purpose of Mastodon as a whole” and “responsibly serve the community,” its blog said.

“Our core mission remains the same: to create the tools and digital spaces where people can build authentic, constructive online communities free from ads, data exploitation, manipulative algorithms, or corporate monopolies,” Mastodon’s blog said.

Mastodon’s founder cedes control, refuses to become next Musk or Zuckerberg Read More »

Meta kills diversity programs, claiming DEI has become “too charged”

content moderation, dei, diversity, facebook, fact checking, hate speech, Instagram, Meta, Policy, threads / Mike M. / January 10, 2025

Meta has reportedly ended diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs that influenced staff hiring and training, as well as vendor decisions, effective immediately.

According to an internal memo viewed by Axios and verified by Ars, Meta’s vice president of human resources, Janelle Gale, told Meta employees that the shift was due to “legal and policy landscape surrounding diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in the United States is changing.”

It’s another move by Meta that some view as part of the company’s larger effort to align with the incoming Trump administration’s politics. In December, Donald Trump promised to crack down on DEI initiatives at companies and on college campuses, The Guardian reported.

Earlier this week, Meta cut its fact-checking program, which was introduced in 2016 after Trump’s first election to prevent misinformation from spreading. In a statement announcing Meta’s pivot to X’s Community Notes-like approach to fact-checking, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg claimed that fact-checkers were “too politically biased” and “destroyed trust” on Meta platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Threads.

Trump has also long promised to renew his war on alleged social media censorship while in office. Meta faced backlash this week over leaked rule changes relaxing Meta’s hate speech policies, The Intercept reported, which Zuckerberg said were “out of touch with mainstream discourse.” Those changes included allowing anti-trans slurs previously banned, as well as permitting women to be called “property” and gay people to be called “mentally ill,” Mashable reported. In a statement, GLAAD said that rolling back safety guardrails risked turning Meta platforms into “unsafe landscapes filled with dangerous hate speech, violence, harassment, and misinformation” and alleged that Meta appeared to be willing to “normalize anti-LGBTQ hatred for profit.”

Meta kills diversity programs, claiming DEI has become “too charged” Read More »

Meta axes third-party fact-checkers in time for second Trump term

facebook, Instagram, Meta, Policy, Trump / 9u50fv / January 7, 2025

Zuckerberg says Meta will “work with President Trump” to fight censorship.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg during the Meta Connect event in Menlo Park, California on September 25, 2024. Credit: Getty Images | Bloomberg

Meta announced today that it’s ending the third-party fact-checking program it introduced in 2016, and will rely instead on a Community Notes approach similar to what’s used on Elon Musk’s X platform.

The end of third-party fact-checking and related changes to Meta policies could help the company make friends in the Trump administration and in governments of conservative-leaning states that have tried to impose legal limits on content moderation. The operator of Facebook and Instagram announced the changes in a blog post and a video message recorded by CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

“Governments and legacy media have pushed to censor more and more. A lot of this is clearly political,” Zuckerberg said. He said the recent elections “feel like a cultural tipping point toward once again prioritizing speech.”

“We’re going to get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with Community Notes, similar to X, starting in the US,” Zuckerberg said. “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 US.”

Meta says the soon-to-be-discontinued fact-checking program includes over 90 third-party organizations that evaluate posts in over 60 languages. The US-based fact-checkers are AFP USA, Check Your Fact, Factcheck.org, Lead Stories, PolitiFact, Science Feedback, Reuters Fact Check, TelevisaUnivision, The Dispatch, and USA Today.

The independent fact-checkers rate the accuracy of posts and apply ratings such as False, Altered, Partly False, Missing Context, Satire, and True. Meta adds notices to posts rated as false or misleading and notifies users before they try to share the content or if they shared it in the past.

Meta: Experts “have their own biases”

In the blog post that accompanied Zuckerberg’s video message, Chief Global Affairs Officer Joel Kaplan said the 2016 decision to use independent fact-checkers seemed like “the best and most reasonable choice at the time… The intention of the program was to have these independent experts give people more information about the things they see online, particularly viral hoaxes, so they were able to judge for themselves what they saw and read.”

But experts “have their own biases and perspectives,” and the program imposed “intrusive labels and reduced distribution” of content “that people would understand to be legitimate political speech and debate,” Kaplan wrote.

The X-style Community Notes system lets the community “decide when posts are potentially misleading and need more context, and people across a diverse range of perspectives decide what sort of context is helpful for other users to see… Just like they do on X, Community Notes [on Meta sites] will require agreement between people with a range of perspectives to help prevent biased ratings,” Kaplan wrote.

The end of third-party fact-checking will be implemented in the US before other countries. Meta will also move its internal trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California, Zuckerberg said. “Our US-based content review is going to be based in Texas. As we work to promote free expression, I think it will help us build trust to do this work in places where there is less concern about the bias of our teams,” he said. Meta will continue to take “legitimately bad stuff” like drugs, terrorism, and child exploitation “very seriously,” Zuckerberg said.

Zuckerberg pledges to work with Trump

Meta will “phase in a more comprehensive community notes system” over the next couple of months, Zuckerberg said. Meta, which donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund, will also “work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world that are going after American companies and pushing to censor more,” Zuckerberg said.

Zuckerberg said that “Europe has an ever-increasing number of laws institutionalizing censorship,” that “Latin American countries have secret courts that can quietly order companies to take things down,” and that “China has censored apps from even working in the country.” Meta needs “the support of the US government” to push back against other countries’ content-restriction orders, he said.

“That’s why it’s been so difficult over the past four years when even the US government has pushed for censorship,” Zuckerberg said, referring to the Biden administration. “By going after US and other American companies, it has emboldened other governments to go even further. But now we have the opportunity to restore free expression, and I am excited to take it.”

Brendan Carr, Trump’s pick to lead the Federal Communications Commission, praised Meta’s policy changes. Carr has promised to shift the FCC’s focus from regulating telecom companies to cracking down on Big Tech and media companies that he alleges are part of a “censorship cartel.”

“President Trump’s resolute and strong support for the free speech rights of everyday Americans is already paying dividends,” Carr wrote on X today. “Facebook’s announcements is [sic] a good step in the right direction. I look forward to monitoring these developments and their implementation. The work continues until the censorship cartel is completely dismantled and destroyed.”

Group: Meta is “saying the truth doesn’t matter”

Meta’s changes were criticized by Public Citizen, a nonprofit advocacy group founded by Ralph Nader. “Asking users to fact-check themselves is tantamount to Meta saying the truth doesn’t matter,” Public Citizen co-president Lisa Gilbert said. “Misinformation will flow more freely with this policy change, as we cannot assume that corrections will be made when false information proliferates. The American people deserve accurate information about our elections, health risks, the environment, and much more.”

Media advocacy group Free Press said that “Zuckerberg is one of many billionaires who are cozying up to dangerous demagogues like Trump and pushing initiatives that favor their bottom lines at the expense of everything and everyone else.” Meta appears to be abandoning its “responsibility to protect its many users, and align[ing] the company more closely with an incoming president who’s a known enemy of accountability,” Free Press Senior Counsel Nora Benavidez said.

X’s Community Notes system was criticized in a recent report by the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), which said it “found that 74 percent of accurate community notes on US election misinformation never get shown to users.” (X previously sued the CCDH, but the lawsuit was dismissed by a federal judge.)

Previewing other changes, Zuckerberg said that Meta will eliminate content restrictions “that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse” and change how it enforces 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, we’re going to rely on someone reporting an issue before we take action,” he said. “The problem is 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 platforms.”

Meta to relax filters, recommend more political content

Zuckerberg said Meta will re-tune content filters “to require much higher confidence before taking down content.” He said this means Meta will “catch less bad stuff” but will “also reduce the number of innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally take down.”

Meta has “built a lot of complex systems to moderate content,” he noted. Even if these systems “accidentally censor just 1 percent of posts, that’s millions of people, and we’ve reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship,” he said.

Kaplan wrote that Meta has censored too much harmless content and that “too many people find themselves wrongly locked up in ‘Facebook jail.'”

“In recent years we’ve developed increasingly complex systems to manage content across our platforms, partly in response to societal and political pressure to moderate content,” Kaplan wrote. “This approach has gone too far. As well-intentioned as many of these efforts have been, they have expanded over time to the point where we are making too many mistakes, frustrating our users and too often getting in the way of the free expression we set out to enable.”

Another upcoming change is that Meta will recommend more political posts. “For a while, the community asked to see less politics because it was making people stressed, so we stopped recommending these posts,” Zuckerberg said. “But it feels like we’re in a new era now, and we’re starting to get feedback that people want 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.”

Jon is a Senior IT Reporter for Ars Technica. He covers the telecom industry, Federal Communications Commission rulemakings, broadband consumer affairs, court cases, and government regulation of the tech industry.

Meta axes third-party fact-checkers in time for second Trump term Read More »

RFK Jr’s anti-vaccine group can’t sue Meta for agreeing with CDC, judge rules

anti-vaccine, censorship, children's health defense, disinformation, facebook, First Amendment, free speech, Instagram, Meta, misinformation, Policy, robert f kennedy jr / Shannon Garcia / August 12, 2024

Enlarge / Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

The Children’s Health Defense (CHD), an anti-vaccine group founded by Robert F. Kennedy Jr, has once again failed to convince a court that Meta acted as a state agent when censoring the group’s posts and ads on Facebook and Instagram.

In his opinion affirming a lower court’s dismissal, US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Eric Miller wrote that CHD failed to prove that Meta acted as an arm of the government in censoring posts. Concluding that Meta’s right to censor views that the platforms find “distasteful” is protected by the First Amendment, Miller denied CHD’s requested relief, which had included an injunction and civil monetary damages.

“Meta evidently believes that vaccines are safe and effective and that their use should be encouraged,” Miller wrote. “It does not lose the right to promote those views simply because they happen to be shared by the government.”

CHD told Reuters that the group “was disappointed with the decision and considering its legal options.”

The group first filed the complaint in 2020, arguing that Meta colluded with government officials to censor protected speech by labeling anti-vaccine posts as misleading or removing and shadowbanning CHD posts. This caused CHD’s traffic on the platforms to plummet, CHD claimed, and ultimately, its pages were removed from both platforms.

However, critically, Miller wrote, CHD did not allege that “the government was actually involved in the decisions to label CHD’s posts as ‘false’ or ‘misleading,’ the decision to put the warning label on CHD’s Facebook page, or the decisions to ‘demonetize’ or ‘shadow-ban.'”

“CHD has not alleged facts that allow us to infer that the government coerced Meta into implementing a specific policy,” Miller wrote.

Instead, Meta “was entitled to encourage” various “input from the government,” justifiably seeking vaccine-related information provided by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as it navigated complex content moderation decisions throughout the pandemic, Miller wrote.

Therefore, Meta’s actions against CHD were due to “Meta’s own ‘policy of censoring,’ not any provision of federal law,” Miller concluded. “The evidence suggested that Meta had independent incentives to moderate content and exercised its own judgment in so doing.”

None of CHD’s theories that Meta coordinated with officials to deprive “CHD of its constitutional rights” were plausible, Miller wrote, whereas the “innocent alternative”—”that Meta adopted the policy it did simply because” CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Meta “share the government’s view that vaccines are safe and effective”—appeared “more plausible.”

Meta “does not become an agent of the government just because it decides that the CDC sometimes has a point,” Miller wrote.

Equally not persuasive were CHD’s notions that Section 230 immunity—which shields platforms from liability for third-party content—”‘removed all legal barriers’ to the censorship of vaccine-related speech,” such that “Meta’s restriction of that content should be considered state action.”

“That Section 230 operates in the background to immunize Meta if it chooses to suppress vaccine misinformation—whether because it shares the government’s health concerns or for independent commercial reasons—does not transform Meta’s choice into state action,” Miller wrote.

One judge dissented over Section 230 concerns

In his dissenting opinion, Judge Daniel Collins defended CHD’s Section 230 claim, however, suggesting that the appeals court erred and should have granted CHD injunctive and declaratory relief from alleged censorship. CHD CEO Mary Holland told The Defender that the group was pleased the decision was not unanimous.

According to Collins, who like Miller is a Trump appointee, Meta could never have built its massive social platforms without Section 230 immunity, which grants platforms the ability to broadly censor viewpoints they disfavor.

It was “important to keep in mind” that “the vast practical power that Meta exercises over the speech of millions of others ultimately rests on a government-granted privilege to which Meta is not constitutionally entitled,” Collins wrote. And this power “makes a crucial difference in the state-action analysis.”

As Collins sees it, CHD could plausibly allege that Meta’s communications with government officials about vaccine-related misinformation targeted specific users, like the “disinformation dozen” that includes both CHD and Kennedy. In that case, it appears possible to Collins that Section 230 provides a potential opportunity for government to target speech that it disfavors through mechanisms provided by the platforms.

“Having specifically and purposefully created an immunized power for mega-platform operators to freely censor the speech of millions of persons on those platforms, the Government is perhaps unsurprisingly tempted to then try to influence particular uses of such dangerous levers against protected speech expressing viewpoints the Government does not like,” Collins warned.

He further argued that “Meta’s relevant First Amendment rights” do not “give Meta an unbounded freedom to work with the Government in suppressing speech on its platforms.” Disagreeing with the majority, he wrote that “in this distinctive scenario, applying the state-action doctrine promotes individual liberty by keeping the Government’s hands away from the tempting levers of censorship on these vast platforms.”

The majority agreed, however, that while Section 230 immunity “is undoubtedly a significant benefit to companies like Meta,” lawmakers’ threats to weaken Section 230 did not suggest that Meta’s anti-vaccine policy was coerced state action.

“Many companies rely, in one way or another, on a favorable regulatory environment or the goodwill of the government,” Miller wrote. “If that were enough for state action, every large government contractor would be a state actor. But that is not the law.”

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