Published on the 23/01/2025 | Written by Heather Wright

But ditching the platforms unlikely…

Local businesses are being advised to tread carefully and up their due diligence and their own moderation in order to avoid reputational risk in the wake of Meta’s roll back of content moderation restrictions.

Earlier this month, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the company was overhauling its content moderation and moving to ‘community’ moderation.

“It is thinking about how you can sensibly continue to use the channel in a way that mitigates any potential risk.”

The changes will begin in the US.

In his video announcement of the changes, Zuckerberg framed them as a way to reduce mistakes and return to Meta’s ‘roots around free expression’.

Fact checkers will be dropped and replaced with a ‘community notes’ system, similar to X, where users can annotate posts they believe are false or need context. (Unlike X’s system, which applies to both paid and unpaid posts, Meta has said that community notes system won’t apply to paid ads, the Wall Street Journal reports.)

Restrictions on some topics, including gender, are also being removed, and enforcement for policy violations will change, including focusing automated systems which scan for policy violations only on illegal, high-severity violations like terrorism and child sexual exploitation, requiring user reports before taking action on less severe violations, and increasing the confidence threshold required before content is removed.

Move ‘civic’ content – aka politics – will also be appearing on feeds across Facebook, Instagram and Threads.

The changes are likely to see a surge of misinformation, hateful and inflammatory speech on Facebook and Instagram – and see advertisers messages appearing alongside potentially unsavoury content.

Bodo Lang, Massey University professor of marketing analytics, says the changes make it ‘a little bit more risky’ to use Meta’s platforms because there is now greater risk that brands will be caught up in inappropriate, offensive, or misleading behaviour.

“It is opening up the ability for users to be more explicit.

“If you are a business you need to be pretty careful about what type of influencers you align yourself with.”

While Lang says there aren’t any hard figures on how many Australian and New Zealand businesses are harnessing influencers on Meta’s channels, he believes at least a quarter are.

Influencers are ranked into different categories, based on their follower numbers, and Lang says his sense is those with fewer followers are more likely to violate the guidelines because they have greater need to grow their followers – something that might be achieved in this day and age by being more outspoken and controversial on topics.

“If you are a brand and you commission someone to review a product or whatever it is, there is a slightly bigger risk now that your brand could be caught up in something that is not appropriate.”

He says brands will need to do more due diligence on any influencers they align with. The good news however, is that doing that due diligence is relatively easy, he says.

“Most influencers have an established track record that is published online. You can literally see what posts they have done, their tonality, the voice they’re using, images, videos, the gestures they use… all of that is very discoverable and means you can do your due diligence relatively easily.”

It’s not just the use of influencers which could prove more challenging. Lang says the lack of moderation on company posts means brands will also need to be more cognisant of how they want to handle comments.

Enabling all comments, immediately, without any moderation could be ‘very risky’, but not allowing any comments suggests a brand isn’t interested in dialogue – an equally risky prospect.

“This is another area where brands need to think a little more carefully about what some users, who perceive [the Meta changes] as being freedom, might say in the comments made in response to a brand’s post online.

Lang is also encouraging local businesses to be very clear on what their own brand is and the personality they want to project in a world where a political swing to the more extreme right is bringing with it more strident belief that freedom of speech trumps everything.

“Be clear on your brand values and have them to serve as guiding principles for creating and responding to online content. Do you want to be a passive aggressive bully? Do you want to be trustworthy and loved?

“Often social media is delegated to someone quite junior because we assume they can do the social media, but they often don’t have a lot of experience or a keen understanding of the brand, so just making sure the people in charge of those channels have been calibrated in line with what your brand values are can help avoid a huge disaster online – which is very easy to create.”

But while the changes may spook some advertisers who are already concerned about brand safety on social platforms and wary of their messages appearing alongside inflammatory content, Lang says abandoning the platforms isn’t the solution.

“Some big brands might do this, but the lure of eye balls is too good to ignore. These are channels where people are.

“You can try to ignore these platforms and say they’ve become too loose, but it’s where the users are and it takes a pretty bold brand to ignore a channel through which you can reach maybe 25 percent of your target. It is just thinking about how you can sensibly continue to use the channel in a way that really mitigates any potential risk.”

While X’s 2023 loosening of content moderation saw its ads business plummet as advertisers up and left, analysts globally have suggested that’s unlikely to happen with Meta, which has a stronger position in the digital advertising ecosystem.

Zuckerberg’s announcement also included mention of plans to work with President Trump ‘to push back on governments around the world’, claiming ‘they’re going after American companies and pushing to censor more’.

He called out Europe, and claimed Latin American countries have ‘secret courts’ that can order companies to quietly take things down.

“By going after us and other American companies, it has emboldened other governments to go even further,” he said, adding that the only way to push back ‘on this global trend’ was with the support of the US government.

While no mention was made of Australia, the country is in the crosshairs of Zuckerberg and Trump ‘First Buddy’ Elon Musk after passing legislation last year to ban under-16s from accessing social media platforms.

The federal government had also touted plans to fine internet platforms for failing to prevent the spread of misinformation, but dropped that bill in November. A scheme to force platforms to pay for Australian news is still on the cards.