David Bridges
- Mark Zuckerberg said Facebook did not have a “shadow banning” policy.
- The Meta CEO made the comments on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast.
- He said “shadow banning” was a slang term, but admitted there are “millions of mistakes” made.
Mark Zuckerberg said Facebook has no “shadow banning” policy, but admitted that mistakes do happen.
In a three-hour interview on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, the Meta CEO talked about topics from the metaverse to his views on the credibility of the FBI, calling it a “legitimate institution.”
Rogan then asked Zuckerberg to explain whether “shadow banning” occurred on social media platforms such as Facebook. He replied: “There’s no policy that is ‘shadow banning’, so I think it’s sort of a slang term. But that maybe refers to some of the demotions [of posts] that we’re talking about.”
Zuckerberg was referring to posts that are marked as false, misinformative, or fall into harmful content categories. They include foreign nations interfering in politics, terrorism, child pornography, and blatant intellectual property violation.
If a post is “marked as false by a fact-checker, it will get somewhat less shown,” Zuckerberg said. “But if there’s some history within a page, then there can be some kind of broader policy that applies.”
He continued: “Unfortunately, there are a lot of mistake, and part of the issue is that there’s 3.5 billion people using these services, and if we make a mistake 0.1% of the time, there’s still million of mistakes … and that sucks.”
He also blamed “some bug in the system, or some system didn’t work like it was supposed to,” for posts that get banned. “It is a real issue, but it isn’t an ideological issue.”
Zuckerberg said some posts failed to reach a wide audience simply because they are not very good.
“Empowering people is very deep in the ethos of the company,” he said. “Whenever we mess that up – which we do, frequently – we pay the price for it and people don’t like those things that we do and we have to run them back.”
Zuckerberg, who is worth $58. billion according to Forbes, created Facebook while studying at Harvard University in 2004 to help other students match names and photos of classmates.
The company listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2012 and was last year renamed Meta. It also owns Instagram and WhatsApp.
Sophie Langley
