Meta would love to avoid politics, but politics won’t go away

Last week, the company made good on a February promise to stop recommending political content to its Instagram and Threads users, when the content comes from accounts those users don’t already follow. Users can still choose to be recommended strangers’ political content if they find the correct setting, The Guardian reports, but otherwise, the default is to not see it. Facebook users will get the same default setting at some point, but not yet.

So, what is “political content” anyway? Meta is somewhat vague on that point, noting that it is content that is “potentially related to things like laws, elections, or social topics,” which are apparently hindering Instagram and Threads from being “a great experience for everyone.”

On the one hand, this newly implemented policy feels like a good way to ward off the rabbit holes toward extremism that platforms like Instagram sometimes create. It should also go some way toward stemming the spread of disinformation, which gets Meta so much grief from lawmakers and regulators.

Counterpoint: Those definitions of “political” are awfully blurry and suggest a future where people are discouraged from sharing ideas on topics of real substance. It’s really hard to please everyone when it comes to this stuff.

Again, Meta may try to shun politics, but politics will always find it. The latest example of that is a recommendation issued today by the company’s independent Oversight Board, regarding its policy about the Arabic term “shaheed,” which means “martyr” in general usage, though it also means “witness” in Qur’anic Arabic.

Meta’s policy is to ban the word when used in reference to what it classifies as a dangerous individual or organization, as it views this as praise in this context. In March 2023, following years of deliberation, the company asked for the Oversight Board’s opinion on the policy, and this morning got it—the opinion would have come late last year if it weren’t for the Gaza war breaking out and necessitating a pause.

According to the Oversight Board, Meta’s “shaheed” policy is “overbroad, and disproportionately restricts freedom of expression and civic discourse.” It leads to the removal of posts that are merely reporting on violence and dangerous entities, and “all too often” leads to the censoring of Muslim users’ posts (the word has made its way into non-Arabic languages, too). So, the board recommended that Meta stop presuming that the word “shaheed” always equates to glorification when used in relation to a dangerous entity, and should only block the content when there’s also some other signal of violence, like a picture of a weapon or a statement advocating a violent act.

Meta said in an emailed statement that it would respond to the recommendation—the Oversight Board can’t tell Meta what to do, except when adjudicating specific content-moderation cases—within 60 days. “We want people to be able to use our platforms to share their views, and have a set of policies to help them do so safely,” said Meta’s spokesperson. “We aim to apply these policies fairly but doing so at scale brings global challenges.”

More news below.

David Meyer

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BEFORE YOU GO

X’s surveillance hypocrisy. X, formerly Twitter, has made a big show of fighting government surveillance, including during Elon Musk’s ownership. But a new report from The Intercept shows that, at least as far as last summer, X is/was selling access to its users’ data to the surveillance company Dataminr, which boasts governments among its customers. Privacy advocates are not amused.