Zuckerberg outlined four strategies for addressing fake news, namely updating community standards, proactively identifying harmful content, discouraging content which is sensationalist, and increasing transparency of Facebook’s internal affairs to the public.
The community standards have been changed in accordance with culture, he said. The teams are based in more than 10 offices across six countries to reflect “the different cultural norms of our community“.
Policies of what can and cannot be posted are changed by “getting input from outside experts and organisations” with close relationships to human rights and free expression.
Zuckerberg referred to a social border which posts may not cross if they do not wish to be removed from the platform. Most of the time, removal of posts that cross this boundary can be automated through the company’s AI trained-system.
This shift from reactive to proactive is expected to become more apparent in other areas: “we have trained our systems to proactively detect the vast majority of problematic content,” he said pointing out that “99% of the terrorist content we remove is flagged by our systems before anyone on our services reports it to us“.
Sensationalist content, referred to as “borderline content”, will be penalised, which results in less distribution and engagement.
“Sensationalist and provocative content is widespread on cable news today and has been a staple of tabloids for more than a century. At scale it can undermine the quality of public discourse and lead to polarisation“, said Zuckerberg.
Setting an example for transparency and accountability, Facebook will be releasing meeting minutes which concern changes in community standards and will report on the extent to which the community standards are working for Facebook users.
“We plan to expand this work to share more information on our policy-making and appeals processes, as well as working on additional research projects,” said Zuckerberg.
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