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Meta’s Nick Clegg Admits Excessive Censorship and High Error Rates in Content Moderation

Meta’s President of Global Affairs Nick Clegg has admitted that the tech giant “still has too high” content moderation error rates.

This is another way of conceding that censorship is alive and well on Meta’s massive platforms, Facebook and Instagram, but also, Threads.

That’s despite there being something of a shift in the way this issue is treated by Meta, including by CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Now Clegg, in a blog post dedicated to 2024 “global elections,” touches on free expression allowed on these social platforms, to state that Meta’s choice is to find a “balance” between free speech and “keeping people safe.”

It’s unclear how Meta “keeps people safe,” but free speech is a straightforward concept, and here Clegg offers a “mea culpa” by not only publicly accepting that there are high rates of error, something that he says “gets in the way” of free expression.

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Clearview Facial Recognition: A Perpetual Police Lineup

Clearview AI CEO Hoan Ton-That admitted that the company scraped 30 billion photos from Facebook and other social media platforms and used them in its massive facial recognition database accessible by law enforcement agencies across the U.S. Critics call the company’s database a “perpetual police lineup.” 

This is an example of the growing cooperation between private companies and government agencies in the ever-growing U.S. surveillance state.

The photos were collected from social media platforms without users’ permission or knowledge.

Clearview AI markets its facial recognition database as a tool allowing law enforcement to rapidly generate leads “to help identify suspects, witnesses and victims to close cases faster and keep communities safe.” According to Ton-That, law enforcement agencies across the U.S. have accessed the company’s database over 1 million times since 2017.

According to a CNN report last year, more than 3,100 U.S. agencies use Clearview AI, including the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security.

In a statement, Ton-That said, “Clearview AI’s database of publicly available images is lawfully collected, just like any other search engine like Google.”

While photo scraping might be legal, Facebook sent Clearview AI a cease and desist order in 2020 for violation of the platform’s terms of service. In an email to Insider, a Meta spokesperson said, “Clearview AI’s actions invade people’s privacy, which is why we banned their founder from our services and sent them a legal demand to stop accessing any data, photos, or videos from our services.”

Fight for the Future director of campaigns Caitlin Seeley George called Clearview “a total affront to peoples’ rights, full stop,” and said, “Police should not be able to use this tool.”

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Meta Confirms US Military Running Fake Social Media Accounts to Push Propaganda

Facebook’s parent company Meta has acknowledged the discovery of several clusters of fake accounts and pages believed to be linked to individuals “associated with the US military,” according to the company’s latest adversarial threat report published this week.

“Although the people behind this operation attempted to conceal their identities and coordination, our investigation found links to individuals associated with the US military,” the company said in a blog post on Tuesday.

The influence campaign was discovered earlier this year and in total Meta removed 39 Facebook and 26 Instagram accounts, as well as 16 pages and two groups, all for violating the company’s policy against “coordinated inauthentic behavior.”

The social media giant admitted that the large-scale operation ran beyond those several dozen accounts and across many other internet platforms, including Twitter, YouTube and Telegram – as well as major Russian social networks VKontakte and Odnoklassniki. It seemingly attempted to downplay the discovery by insisting that the “majority of this operation’s posts had little to no engagement from authentic communities” and highlighting similar “deceptive campaigns” by China and Russia.

Meta’s acknowledgement substantiates a bombshell investigation by the Washington Post that revealed the Pentagon was forced to launch a “sweeping audit of how it conducts clandestine information warfare,” after a variety of social media accounts, which its operatives used to target foreign audiences in elaborate psychological warfare efforts, were exposed.

The takedown of the influence network was initially highlighted by researchers at Graphika and the Stanford Internet Observatory, which back in August published a report about online networks allegedly pushing “pro-Western,” anti-Russia and other politicized narratives.

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