Meghan Markle and Prince Harry said Meta’s new fact-checking policy “should concern us all deeply.”
“It doesn’t matter whether your views are left, right or somewhere in between – Meta’s latest news about changes to their policies directly undermines freedom of speech,” the former royal couple said in a statement on their website.
Last week, Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, announced that Meta would shut down its fact-checking program because it was “too politically biased.” Instead, the company would implement a community notes feature similar to the one on X, formerly Twitter, which is owned by billionaire Elon Musk. Community Notes rely on users to add notes or corrections to posts.
Meta will also “remove restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are out of touch with mainstream discourse.” Users are now allowed to call women “household objects” and refer to transgender people as “it.”
Markle and Prince Harry said these new guidelines will allow “more abuse” and normalize “hate speech.”
“In an already confusing and, in many cases, deliberately disruptive information environment, Meta has shown that their words and commitments have very little meaning or integrity,” the couple said in a statement. “As they announce these changes in response to political winds, they are once again abandoning public safety in favor of profit, chaos and control. The company’s decision to roll back security is so far removed from the values and promises to its users – including the parents and families around the world calling for change – that it is now deeply misleading.”
In Zuckerberg’s announcement of the policy changes, he said the move to be “more inclusive” has “gone too far.”
“After Trump was first elected in 2016, traditional media wrote nonstop about how disinformation was a threat to democracy,” Zuckerberg said. “We have tried in good faith to address these concerns without becoming the arbiters of the truth, but the fact-checkers have simply been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they have created, especially in the US.”
Following the January 6, 2021, insurrection, Meta banned Donald Trump from Facebook and Instagram after the former president used social media to incite violence, but Zuckerberg has recently attempted to get back into the newly elected president’s good graces. Zuckerberg met with Trump in Florida and Meta donated $1 million to his inauguration fund.
Markle and Prince Harry said they are “urging Meta to reconsider and reinstate policies that protect all users,” and called on industry leaders “to uphold their obligations to integrity and public safety in online spaces to come, and we applaud leaders who refuse to submit to this bullying.”
“Millions of people use Meta’s platforms in the United States. Hundreds of millions of others use them worldwide,” the couple’s statement reads. “Many use the platform to spread joy, build community and share powerful information. Unfortunately, Meta’s recent decisions go directly against its mission to ‘build human connections’ and instead prioritize those who use the platforms to spread hate, lies and division at the expense of everyone else.”
They continued and said Meta’s plan to abandon its diversity, equity and inclusion programs will ‘knowingly’ ‘harm’ people and contribute to a ‘global mental health crisis’.
“Given the profound global impact that Meta’s decisions have on the world – from which many are still recovering or actively suffering – one country’s politics should never determine whether freedom of expression and civil and human rights are so clearly protected shape or destroy democracy in online spaces,” the statement reads.
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“Online spaces must be designed with public safety and well-being at their core, and must be able to withstand political pressure and lapses in corporate leadership. This latest move by Meta is an example of a social media company – fully aware of their power to shape public debate – ignoring any responsibility to ensure that power is not abused and instead focusing on ego or profit (probably both) to guide decisions that have consequences for society. billions,” they said.