10 Jan 25 | 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.
19 Dec 24 | News and features, Pakistan
In the last week of November, Pakistan went into what was essentially an internet blackout. Social media apps like WhatsApp were inaccessible after the authorities blocked internet and mobile phone services. This was ahead of a planned march to Islamabad by supporters of former Prime Minister Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party (PTI), in protest of Khan’s imprisonment.
The government cited security concerns and initially said it would be a partial shutdown, but internet delays and shutdowns were reported across the country. Two weeks after the protest, users were still reporting connection delays that are impacting both their communications and their livelihoods. In addition to this most recent internet shutdown, Pakistani authorities have also restricted connection through a content specific “firewall”.
This isn’t the only form of censorship seen in Pakistan amid the crackdown on PTI’s long march, both before and after the event. Prominent journalist Matiullah Jan was picked up by a group of unidentified individuals from Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences (PIMS) hospital in Islamabad on 28 November and released on 30 November on bail under a narcotics and terror case that international human rights organisations are calling “bogus” and “baseless”.
Soon after his abduction, his son put out a statement calling out authorities for arresting his father over his reporting. Jan was also abducted in 2020, and is one of many journalists in Pakistan who continue to be punished for their work.
Farieha Aziz, a Karachi-based journalist and director of digital rights organisation Bolo Bhi, told Index that Pakistan’s increase in crackdowns and censorship in recent years impacts people in one of two ways.
“Some will [fight it] even more, and some will become more circumspect,” she said. Experts believe that what happened around the protest seems to be the final piece in long drawn-out efforts to slowly curb internet access and freedom of expression in the country.
With internet access being shut down regularly whenever there’s a major event — including protests and elections — these attempts are becoming increasingly successful.
“These restrictions will only increase. They aren’t something that will go away with time,” said digital rights researcher Seerat Khan, adding that authoritarianism is increasing across the globe and that those influences are being seen in Pakistan too.
Aziz added that Pakistan’s direction makes it comparable with countries which are known for their questionable human rights records. She said that parallels can be made with Myanmar and China, for instance, and restricting the use of virtual private networks (VPNs) can be compared to Russia.
What’s particularly concerning activists and everyday citizens is that this censorship is becoming part of everyday life. Aside from the complete internet shutdowns — which already cause significant damage — internet delays and bans on certain content are also common and a lot harder to spot.
Digital rights activist and researcher Anam Baloch explained that by not blocking entire platforms all the time, Pakistan’s internet bans aren’t always immediately detectable.
“Recently, WhatsApp and Instagram issues were reported but when we tested [them] on OONI [Open Observatory of Network Interference] they were fine because they were not blocking entire platforms,” Baloch told Index.
It’s not just freedom of expression that’s impacted. Pakistan’s economy heavily relies on its growing digital sector, and the country produces 20,000 IT graduates every year — many of whom work as freelancers or in small startups that rely on the internet. IT industry trade association, the Pakistan Software Houses Association (P@SHA), released a statement predicting that the disruptions could result in a loss of $300 million for the country’s IT sector.
“A lot of reporting has been done on how it affects freelancers and small businesses, which is true because they don’t have backups. But what the media is [leaving] out is that the internet forms the basis of most businesses, even in Pakistan, where for some reason people think it doesn’t matter. Everything works on some kind of digital connectivity,” freelance cybercrime and tech journalist Sindhu Abbasi said.
All of these impacts are linked together, Khan added, and freedom of expression directly links to other freedoms like access to information and freedom of association and assembly.
“All these freedoms are under attack,” she said. And there’s no longer much room to challenge the restrictions.”
“You’re out of options of what to do. [Before] you could file a public interest litigation or speak to someone in parliament,” Aziz said, adding: “Not that [anything] happened because of that, but at least there was this dialogue — and now there’s no dialogue.”
Censorship has been slowly increasing, while Pakistanis have looked on in horror as they’ve felt unable to do anything to prevent it. First came the internet and mobile services shutdowns during election days and important events. Then in February of this year, X was banned, as the Interior Ministry claimed the platform was a “threat to peace and national security.”
Abbasi said that under the former PTI government, “the internet would be blocked in areas we call ‘peripheries’, such as Balochistan and Gilgit-Baltistan”. More recently, reports of internet bans in Kurram after problems with sectarian violence in November and in Pakistan-administered Kashmir during protests in May, show just how much the government relies on these bans as a form of control.
For now, rights advocates are losing hope of finding a way out, and many have told Index that things may only get worse from here.
23 Aug 24 | News and features
Why do we tolerate X? Elon Musk’s poisoned well is fast filling up with far-right propaganda, disinformation, hate speech and now, it would seem, adverts for machine guns and grenade launchers from Iran-backed terrorists in Yemen. This is the reality of the free speech utopia the world’s richest man promised us when he took over Twitter. And yet we continue to populate it with content. I do, Index does and many of you reading this will continue to do so. When Dr Johnson said in 1776 that “no man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money” he could not have imagined a world where 335 million blockheads provide free copy for a billionaire.
It’s not just X. The social media business model depends on us all selling our labour for nothing to feed the exponential growth of the platforms.
As Musk has grown closer to Donald Trump, he has begun to openly use X to publish his own personal propaganda for his favoured candidate. His “civil war is inevitable” intervention in Britain’s summer riots demonstrates that he is actively prepared to foment division and racial tension in a country he knows little about. As the US election approaches, Musk seems intent on turning X into an ideological sewer.
So why do we stay? We stay because the rewards are immediate and addictive. We are paid, not in cash, but in dopamine hits and the validation of our followers. And it’s not all negative. Twitter was once a fantastically useful resource for journalists, providing connections, expert knowledge and hard news from an unprecedented international network. When I broadcast to my relatively modest 15,000 followers, the response is more direct and personal that in any other medium I have worked in, including mass circulation newspapers. For a small organisation like Index, X is a vital way of communicating our work with dissidents to our 80,000 followers around the world.
In recent weeks, there has been a noticeable movement away from Musk’s platform. In the UK, journalists have led the X-odus to Threads and Bluesky. In the case of Threads, owned by Meta, it’s not quite clear why it is better to write content for Mark Zuckerberg rather than Musk, although some are remarking that the tone is less openly hostile. Bluesky is positively benign in comparison, but with just six million users it has none of the reach of its nastier competitor.
Personally, I have ended up tripling my workload as I now post not just to X, but to my loyal and impeccably behaved band of 395 followers on Threads and 81 followers on Bluesky.
It would be odd for a free expression organisation to advocate for the boycott of a social media platform, but we have regular discussions internally about the ethics of remaining on X. We will, of course, keep you informed.
There are two stories we have been tracking this week in Thailand and India that would benefit from wider international circulation. The first is the dissolution of the Move Forward party in Thailand, which won the most votes in last year’s elections. Party leader Pita Limjaroenrat promised to end the practice of military intervention in Thai politics, break up monopolies and reform the country’s lese majeste laws, which restrict criticism of the royal family. Limjaroenrat told the Guardian this week: “They’re coming after us. They’re exterminating us.”
Meanwhile, this month marks the fifth anniversary of the Indian government’s decision to strip the state of Jammu and Kashmir of its autonomy. Since then we’ve reported on the many ways in which people’s free expression has been attacked in the region, from newspapers being closed and journalists arrested to mosques being closed. Last year, India’s supreme court backed Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s position on the contested region, which has been ruled in part by Pakistan and India since partition in 1947. Local elections will take place next month and Congress leader Rahul Gandhi pledged last week that he and his opposition alliance, known as the INDIA bloc, will commit themselves to restoring statehood.
19 Feb 24 | Asia and Pacific, News and features, Pakistan
The media in Pakistan, a 240-million strong nation, has seldom been free ever since it removed its colonial shackles from the British Raj in 1947. Spates of draconian laws to curb the press were imposed in the three martial law periods, as well as during the democratic governments, spanning the 77-year life of this South Asian nation. These attacks reached new heights in recent weeks, as Pakistan voted in a tense general election. Critical voices from press and civil society were strangled. The military establishment tried to control the media narrative, while internet blackouts became commonplace. And yet despite this, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) backed independent candidates bagged the largest number of seats in the national and provincial assemblies, in an upset for the military establishment.
“This is peoples’ reaction against the actions,” Mazhar Abbas, a senior award-winning journalist and anchor, told Index. “This is an eye-opener for those who think the suppression could serve their purpose.”
Independent candidates backed by the PTI, the party of Imran Khan, won 93 seats in Pakistan’s National Assembly or lower house of 264 seats, but will not be allowed to form a government as they were forced to run as individuals. Parties of thrice-prime minister Nawaz Sharif secured 75 seats followed by the Pakistani Peoples Party (PPP) with 54 seats. Given these votes the most likely outcome is a coalition government.
“This is a people’s rebellion against the establishment that keeps curbing the media to promote parties of their own choices,” Aziz Sanghur, a senior journalist and author, said. “This is the 21st century and the age of IT, we must not forget.”
Facing fierce clampdowns on their social media accounts, as well as attempts to impede their election campaigns, the contesting candidates had to be on their toes. They managed to outmanoeuvre the censorship through a variety of means including using all of the social media platforms to their advantage.
“Our social media and IT team kept struggling against the closure of data services and our social media accounts, [by] creating VPN connections and using other means,” Yasir Baloch, a PTI candidate for the Sindh provincial assembly told Index.
Members of his constituency extended their help to Baloch.
“On the election day when data service and mobile phone service was switched off, the people in our constituency volunteered to give our team access to their home wi-fi connections. That was a huge favour for us,” he said.
Conventional canvassing methods also had to be re-assessed.
“We managed to hold our meetings [within] the compound wall instead of open places as we had to face the police crackdowns on our rallies,” he said. “We carried our campaign door to door and women played a leading role.”
But it will be hard for Pakistan to establish media freedoms.
“There have been many draconian laws that governed the media and press, but this time ‘invisible’ hands unleashed gagging censorship, which is unprecedented,” said Tauseef Ahmed Khan, a professor and author of several books on Pakistani media and a media practitioner.
Khan was referring to the constant interventions from the powerful military establishment. Many journalists working for the national television channels spoke to Index on the condition of anonymity. They confirmed the practice of daily intervention by the media wing of the military, known as Inter Services Public Relations or ISPR.
“When they [dictated to] us the news packages in the beginning, I predicted that the days were not far off and that they would dictate the whole rundown,” said a senior journalist, who works with Geo TV, the country’s top private television channel.
“My fears came true as now we get dictation from ISPR on a daily basis, with the advice that the news must be broadcast without attribution,” he said.
Empirical surveys with senior journalists at many independent news channels confirmed this, including ARY, Neo News, Abb Takk, Aaj TV, Hum TV, 92 News, KTN, Express TV, 24 News and Dawn News. These are all top-ranking television channels, watched widely across Pakistan.
“We are obliged to run that news to protect our job,” one journalist said.
The party that won the last general election and was in power from 2018 until 2022 remained a pivotal target of the censorship. Imran Khan, the former cricketer turned politician, led his PTI party. Coming into power for the first time in 2018, Khan had a strong backing from the military establishment, a channel that inherently matters more than popular votes in the country. Catalysing the military support, Khan made full use of censorship and media clampdowns to suppress independent journalists as well as political opponents. Legal cases were registered against media houses, journalists and social media commentators for raising voices against his policies and political discourse.
“Khan in fact torpedoed the financial structure of the media industry, [which] was a fatal blow to the free press,” Tauseef Ahmed Khan said.
Geo News, the most influential TV channel in the country which was critical of Imran Khan and supportive of Nawaz Sharif, was cast out of government sponsored advertisements in 2020, the biggest source of revenue to the industry. It was taken off air in different cities and parts of the country, including the cantonment areas, administered by the military.
But the tables turned when Khan was ousted in 2022 in a no-confidence vote after a fallout with the military. He was jailed for corruption, and later for leaking state secrets.
Tit-for-tat censorship ensued under the new under-the-radar sanctions. Khan’s party was declared proscribed and naming it or Khan on television channels was banned by the military-backed coalition government of the Pakistan Democratic Movement.
No let-up was seen in censorship by the care-taker government appointed in August 2023, which only had a mandate to hold general elections in Pakistan. The caretaker government under Prime Minister Anwar ul Haq Kakar took more stringent measures to black out Khan and his party from the mainstream media.
The undeclared news boycott of Khan’s party continued until the election day on 8 February 2024, while its supporters ran a robust campaign on social media. His party was denied the opportunity to contest the election under the pretext of the party’s failure to hold intra-party elections, a constitutional prerequisite for a political party to become eligible for general election participation.
Frustrating the party’s social media ‘warriors’, the authorities clamped down by switching off internet networks countrywide repeatedly over recent years, usually targeting social media or messaging services.
“Curbing internet access during elections strikes at democracy’s heart, betraying human rights,” Surfshark, a media watchdog said in a statement.
On the very day of elections on 8 February, a complete shutdown of mobile services crippled journalists in the field who were covering the elections. The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority, the state-regulator, said it had decided to do so in view of the worsening law and order situation.
“The decision to suspend telecommunications and mobile internet services on election day is a blunt attack on the rights to freedom of expression and peaceful assembly,” Amnesty International reacted.
The failures of the mainstream media alarms media pundits, who see an ominous trend in the coming weeks.
“This is very unfortunate that the mainstream media seem to have lost its credibility against the social media in the country,” said Sohail Sangi, a veteran journalist, who has served imprisonment in dictatorial regimes for raising his voice for press freedom.
It is feared that propaganda will replace factual news.
“We know that on social media, largely unauthentic info goes viral and its impact is huge,” Tauseef Ahmed Khan said.
“This might transform the media landscape in the country if things are not fixed.”
