Sociable: Will Meta’s revised approach to moderation impact its ad business?

Will Meta’s decision this week to loosen its moderation rules and do away with fact-checking make Facebook and Instagram less brand secure because of this?

That seems to be what happened on X following Elon Musk’s moves to reduce internal content moderation staff in favor of user-sourced Community Notes, with various reports and investigations suggesting that the platform isn’t any longer a secure place for brands to display their messages. Following these moves, X’s ad revenue intake has declined by around 60%.

The same scenario could play out for Meta, according to a wave of industry commentary on the news. But there are key differences between Meta and X that would affect how the situation unrolls. 

For starters, a part of X’s problem on this respect has been Musk himself, and his propensity to generate headlines along with his own statements and stances. Which can be Musk’s strength, in that he’s effectively the explanation why his corporations don’t need to pay for ads, because Elon is a walking promotional department inside himself.

But at X, with Elon taking increasingly controversial and divisive stances, while also being the platform’s most followed user, the association between these views and the app has likely hurt the platform’s fame greater than Meta’s announced changes will.

Though at the identical time, Meta’s changes are controversial, and they’re going to similarly lead to more harmful content being shown to users in its apps.

For example, based on the most recent updates to Meta’s Hateful Conduct policy, which were released today:

• Meta will now not outright ban all use of slurs used to attack people on the premise of “their protected characteristics.” Protected characteristics include race, ethnicity and gender identity. So essentially, Meta has removed a clause that may stop people being targeted with terms based specifically on these elements.  
• Meta will now allow people to use terms relating to sex or gender, even when utilized in an insulting way, inside discussions relating to political or religious topics, “corresponding to when discussing transgender rights, immigration, or homosexuality.” So users will probably be allowed to use potentially harmful terms inside these conversations, with Meta now not looking to contextualize such, because it has within the recent past.
• There have also been various changes designed to simplify the principles and facilitate more leeway around potentially insulting terms. Meta has also removed restrictions on comments that concentrate on people based on the suggestion, for instance, that they might have spread COVID-19 (though that is now largely outdated either way).  
• Meta’s also looking to take a more hands off approach, generally, inside discussions around things like immigration and gender identity, that are the topic of frequent political discourse and debate.

Essentially, Meta’s now moved to reduce its rules to allow for more sorts of speech, while the reduction of internal moderation and external fact-checking staff may even lead to more of those comments seeing increased exposure within the app either way. Which implies that there are going to be more offensive, harmful posts shown to more people in its apps.

Which Zuck himself acknowledges.

In his overview of the update, Zuckerberg explained that:

“The reality is that it is a trade-off. It means we’re going to catch less bad stuff, but we’ll also reduce the variety of innocent people’s posts and accounts that we unintentionally take down.”

So more harmful posts will get through, and with over 3 billion each day lively users, the scope of potential harm on this respect is significantly higher than it’s on X.

So logically, that ought to see more advertisers reconsidering their approach to Facebook and IG, like they did with X. Though I believe that we won’t see the identical backlash.

Because Facebook and Instagram do provide such broad reach, because they each have such huge audiences, and the potential of that’s just too significant to cut out for a lot of brands. So while it was relatively easy to take an ethical stance on X, which has a fraction of Meta’s audience, I just don’t see brands being as willing to do the identical this time around.

But realistically, that’s what should occur. There ought to be the identical varieties of critical reports around Meta ad placement, and the impacts that these changes can have for brands, because there will probably be impacts, the identical as there have been on X, and Meta should face the identical scrutiny that X has for allowing such.

And again, it’ll be worse on Facebook and Instagram, based on exposure potential alone. The relative harms here will probably be significant.

So, do you have to be reconsidering your approach to social media ads because of this? Yes, you most likely should, but I doubt that the moral outrage will reach the identical levels this time around.