{"id":529082,"date":"2026-07-07T06:16:26","date_gmt":"2026-07-07T06:16:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/529082\/"},"modified":"2026-07-07T06:16:26","modified_gmt":"2026-07-07T06:16:26","slug":"meta-bosses-grilled-over-decision-to-cut-censorship-that-has-potentially-unleashed-more-antisemitic-content-royal-commission-on-antisemitism-and-social-cohesion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/529082\/","title":{"rendered":"Meta bosses grilled over decision to cut \u2018censorship\u2019 that has potentially unleashed more antisemitic content | Royal commission on antisemitism and social cohesion"},"content":{"rendered":"

A decision aimed at reducing \u201ccensorship\u201d on major social media sites including Facebook and Instagram<\/a> potentially led to greater levels of hate speech, the royal commission into antisemitism has heard.<\/p>\n

Meta announced in January 2025<\/a>, after the re-election of Donald Trump in the US, that it would \u201creduce censorship\u201d, get rid of factcheckers and only tackle illegal and very serious violations proactively, relying on users to report less serious breaches. Its platforms include Facebook, Instagram and Threads.<\/p>\n

At the time its chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, described it as a \u201ctrade-off\u201d<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt means we\u2019re going to catch less bad stuff, but we\u2019ll also reduce the number of innocent people\u2019s posts and accounts that we accidentally take down,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Meta\u2019s global director of core policy, Benjamin Good, told the inquiry on Monday that its processes had improved since the 2025 changes and were focused on removing content that could cause offline harm, such as terrorism threats or child exploitation.<\/p>\n

But the counsel assisting Richard Lancaster said the inquiry had heard complaints that the changes allowed more antisemitic content and that it was \u201centirely unrealistic\u201d to think they hadn\u2019t changed how content moderators operated.<\/p>\n

He also pointed to witnesses to the commission being targeted<\/a> on Facebook after giving evidence.<\/p>\n

And he showed the inquiry Meta\u2019s internal \u201cfrequently asked questions\u201d advice that said offensive comments such as \u201cgay people are sinners\u201d would be allowed. False claims including \u201cimmigrants are criminals\u201d and \u201cwhite people are all Nazis\u201d are also allowed.<\/p>\n

Sign up for the Breaking News Australia email<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cBlack people are more violent than whites\u201d is acceptable, according to the advice, but not \u201cblack people are all drug dealers\u201d because that is a charge of specific criminal behaviour.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is not Meta\u2019s role to police offensiveness,\u201d the document states.<\/p>\n

Good said the \u201cgold standard\u201d was to remove hateful content before it was seen but that risked \u201cover-enforcement\u201d \u2013 the censorship of the wrong kind of content \u2013 so it was a matter of balancing risks.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor instance, we\u2019ve heard from Jewish communities and others, in times of crisis, that they\u2019ve had content removed when they were actually trying to speak out against atrocities,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

skip past newsletter promotion<\/a>Free newsletter | When needed<\/p>\n

Sign up to Breaking News Australia<\/p>\n

Get the most important news as it breaks<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

He said content condemning a terrorist group such as Hamas might be inadvertently removed, which would be a \u201cvery bad outcome\u201d. \u201cOf course, enforcement is critical, but over-enforcement poses significant risk to the communities that we try to protect as well,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Lancaster and Good debated the statistics that Meta provided on the level of hateful conduct.<\/p>\n

Good told the inquiry that Meta used a metric on the prevalence of hateful conduct policy violations, which had sat consistently at 0.02% since 2022.<\/p>\n

Lancaster said it was \u201centirely unrealistic\u201d to think that moderators did not \u201ctake into account the very different approach and more lax approach to enforcement that Mr Zuckerberg announced in January 2025\u201d and that 0.02% of hundreds of billions of pieces of content was still \u201ca very large number in absolute terms\u201d.<\/p>\n

The inquiry was shown graphs showing a steep drop in how much hateful conduct Meta took action on.<\/p>\n

The commissioner, Virginia Bell, asked for a \u201cplausible explanation\u201d for the 79% drop \u201cother than the announced change in the policy\u201d. Good said it was a complex ecosystem and he didn\u2019t know if it related solely to policy changes.<\/p>\n

The internal document also noted that Meta continued \u201cto prohibit a wide range of attacks based on protected characteristics including dehumanising speech, calls for harm, harmful stereotypes, slurs, various types of insults, and calls for exclusion\u201d.<\/p>\n

Good pointed out that Meta cracked down on the use of the word \u201cZionists\u201d as part of a broader expansion of its hate speech policies<\/a>. He told the commission that people were using \u201cZionist<\/a>\u201d as a proxy for Jewish people overall to spread conspiracy theories about them having control over the media, the government, and so on.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe dictionary definition is these are adherents of a political movement, so that wouldn\u2019t traditionally be a protected characteristic,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cHowever, we did a lot of work engaging with groups with expertise in counterterrorism and cultures around the world and antisemitism in Jewish issues, and found that many people were using the word Zionist as a coded term in content, in order to evade our enforcement against claims that Jewish people have undue control.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo instead of saying \u2018Jewish people do\u2019, they would say \u2018Zionists do\u2019. And again, based on all that work, we determine that that was the intent and therefore have prohibited claims such as \u2018Zionists control the media\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n

Facebook Australia\u2019s public policy director, Mia Garlick, also appeared before the inquiry on Monday morning representing the Meta subsidiary. She said the Australian company liaised with communities but escalated complaints to Meta.<\/p>\n

She also confirmed that Australia still had factcheckers for misinformation but said the \u201ccommunity notes\u201d function that replaced it elsewhere may be rolled out here.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A decision aimed at reducing \u201ccensorship\u201d on major social media sites including Facebook and Instagram potentially led to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":529083,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-529082","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/529082","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=529082"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/529082\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/529083"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=529082"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=529082"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=529082"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}