Martin Lewis has issued a stark warning to Facebook and Instagram users after Meta announced a rule change. The BBC and ITV presenter said it was a ‘seismic’ change
Martin Lewis has issued a “seismic” warning to Facebook users following a rule change by Meta. The company plans to eliminate fact-checkers, significantly reduce censorship, and promote more political content across its platforms: Threads, Facebook, and Instagram.
Mr Lewis expressed his concern, stating: “This looks a seismic change. It affects all areas. Focusing only on my work area though. Having sued Facebook over scam ads in the past. Is there’s no mention of scams here. Will this free up more people to be ripped off? ” In a video message, Mark Zuckerberg pledged to prioritise free speech following Donald Trump’s return to the White House. He announced that he would “get rid of factcheckers and replace them with community notes similar to X”.
Zuckerberg criticised Meta’s “fact-checkers as being too politically biased and destroying more trust than they’ve created”. He revealed plans to relocate the tech firm’s content moderation teams from California to Texas “where there is less concern about the bias of our teams”.
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He conceded that changes to Meta’s content filtering would result in “catching less bad stuff”. He pointed to Europe as an area with “an ever increasing number of laws institutionalising censorship and making it difficult to build anything innovative”.
He also mentioned that “Latin American countries have secret courts that can order companies to quietly take things down,” reports Birmingham Live.
Zuckerberg has blasted: “Governments and legacy media have pushed to censor more and more. A lot of this is clearly political, but there’s also a lot of legitimately bad stuff out there, drugs, terrorism, child exploitation. These are things that we take very seriously, and I want to make sure that we handle responsibly.
“So we built a lot of complex systems to moderate content, but the problem with complex systems is they make mistakes, even if they accidentally censor just 1% of posts, that’s millions of people, and we’ve reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship. The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards, once again, prioritising speech.”
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