From Russia to the EU: The high stakes of Meta’s content moderation shift

Meta's Mark Zuckerberg. Photo by Alessio Jacona on Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0).
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced that Meta is going to “fight censorship” around the world, along with incoming United States President Donald Trump, who is due to be inaugurated in under a week.
Zuckerberg is framing the change in Meta's content moderation as an “anti-censorship” policy. However, experts say it is rather a business measure that aligns with pleasing the president-elect, Donald Trump. As Zuckerberg said, Meta is reducing costs in protecting against hate speech while also getting rid of fact-checking and reverting instead to users flagging harmful content (also known as making “community notes”) — at least in the US.
This new policy sets a dangerous precedent, although, arguably, is only following the near abandonment of content moderation prior to elections on X (formerly Twitter) by Elon Musk.
However, recent history shows that regulating Meta and X even more than how much the EU already does is putting us on a dangerous path to what autocracies are doing.
Russian internet censorship
Zuckerberg did not mention Russian President Vladimir Putin in his speech. However, he did mention the European Union (EU) as one of the biggest “censors,” as well as Latin America and China. However, since October 2022, Meta and its subsidiaries (apart from WhatsApp, as of the date of publication) have been included on the list of terrorist and extremist organizations in Russia. Not only are they blocked, but technically, one could be arrested for sharing links or putting a logo on a webpage.
This is a cautionary tale; officially, the Kremlin banned the group because Meta announced that it would permit posts such as “death to Russian invaders.”
In March 2022, a Meta official informed BBC News that the company was temporarily deviating from its standard policies “in light of the ongoing invasion of Ukraine,” allowing those impacted by the conflict to “express violent sentiments towards invading armed forces.” Consequently, the Russian government accused Meta of “Russophobia” and designated it as a prohibited organization.
But today, there is no Western social media platform operating in Russia: all of them were blocked for “non-compliance” with Russian laws (at the moment, only messengers Telegram and WhatsApp, and Chinese TikTok are still present).
Various civil society organizations are now urging the EU's president, Ursula Von der Leyen, to have the full strength of EU legislation applied to Meta in order to prevent harm to Europeans. And yes, under the Digital Services Act legislation adopted in 2022, some measures would provide heavy fines in case of non-compliance with risk assessment-based rules for platforms to be able to operate in the EU market. And so they should if the loosened rules on hate speech start hurting vulnerable groups.
However, we need to keep in mind that if X and Meta, under too much pressure from regulators, decide to leave the EU, it would ultimately leave citizens less able to access information. While this is unlikely, according to experts, we need to keep more information available to people, not less of it. Thus, even though Meta is abandoning its fact-checking program (although not yet in the EU), could it be that this part is not as threatening as it seems at first sight? In fact, Zuckerberg promised to bring back political content that might actually have a much better effect on people being well-informed, especially when the European Media Freedom Act comes into full force in August 2025.
Some researchers have been talking about how overestimated the power of any kind of misinformation is on people and that we have given away people's agency to the decisions of platforms.
I can give some examples. My research on platform governance, in part, concerns the steps that were taken to “fight Russian disinformation,” not only after the invasion of Ukraine started but also when the moral panic of foreign intervention in the 2016 US elections was at its peak. Many Russian language media sources have been blocked by the decision of European legislators in the EU, starting from the propaganda channels Russia Today and Sputnik. Since that time, more and more were included in the lists.
Again, some experts say that technocratic solutionism has serious limits against disinformation.
Social media platforms were also blocking and demonetizing content from Russia and those viewed by Russians at their own discretion. For instance, YouTube prohibited monetising any views coming from Russian territories, which, of course, did not play well for the opposition media like, for example, the anti-war and anti-Putin Dozhd channel, whose main audience is, and should be, in Russia.
Should straightforward propaganda be blocked? Maybe. But in this case, how will we even know what the “other side” is saying? At one point, the only sources of news in the Russian language I could find on Google News were from Belarus. Thus, the famous page rank did not work, but who decided what was left as credible news sources? Obviously, the Kremlin decides what is visible on the Russian search engine Yandex. But do we want the same scheme for the EU?
My point is that we have to support legacy media, which is rooted in fact-checking. We must provide funds to local journalists and negotiate with social media platforms to include their content. We must develop public interest social media and AI models and make them open source. In short, create more opportunities and diversity in the tech sector and information ecosystem, not fewer.
As Thomas Kent, a senior fellow for strategic communication at the American Foreign Policy Council and a specialist in Russian propaganda, said in a recent opinion piece:
Western media need to rededicate themselves to accurate, objective news coverage. If citizens are convinced that their own major news sources are unbiased, they will have no reason to seek out fringe sources of news, Russian or otherwise.
Or else, we are no better than Vladimir Putin, who never uses the internet and dreams that no one does, just like in the “golden old days,” or Zuckerberg, who pushes us to “get back to the roots” of free expression.
What they are both doing is very similar in its essence. Except there are no golden old days and no roots to go back to. If these people do not understand it, we have to.
Dr. Daria Dergacheva is an associated researcher at the Platform Governance, Media and Technology Lab at ZeMKI, University of Bremen, Germany. She has also been an editor for Eastern Europe at Global Voices since March 2022 and has previously worked in Russian media and opposition NGOs for over 10 years.
This post is part of RuNet Echo, a Global Voices project to interpret the Russian language internet. All Posts · Read more »
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