2021年一月，在特朗普支持者冲击美国国会后，马克·扎克伯格宣布Meta的新优先任务：减少公司旗下应用（包括Facebook与Instagram）上的政治内容。
随着2024年大选临近，扎克伯格的计划已显成效。在Facebook、Instagram和Threads上，政治内容显著减少。平台自动调整了设置，降低用户看到的政治活动及候选人帖子能见度，并加强了对虚假信息的管控。
内部消息显示，过去每周定期与选举安全高级管理层会面讨论问题的扎克伯格不再亲自出席。他削减了专职处理选举诚信的员工数量，并解散了团队。他还决定不再设立“战室”，用于大选前准备。
为缓解与政治角色相关的负面新闻影响，上个月，扎克伯格向众议院司法委员会发送了一封信件阐述了如何让公司及自己远离政治的想法。他希望呈现中立立场，避免似乎在扮演角色。这被指为反常的大转变，因为十年前，Facebook团队迫切地期望成为选举的主角。
Meta的近常出现的新闻焦点已从其在政治言论中的角色转移，转而向用户推荐更多关于体育、烹饪、动物与名人八卦的内容。本周期内，美国大选的在线政治讨论似乎更多集中在其他平台，如TikTok和Elon Musk创办的X。
尽管政治帖子并未消失在Meta平台上，但它们显得更不突出易见。任何人在Facebook或Instagram上搜索政治团体或贴文都能迅速找到。虚假信息与阴谋论依然通过Facebook群组及WhatsApp传播，并持续从伊朗、中国、俄罗斯和其他国家删除虚假信息活动。例如，在9月的一场辩论中，特朗普散布了一则关于在俄亥俄州辛辛那提的海地移民食用宠物的故事，这条起源于Facebook的假消息已被证实。
数字反欺诈研究中心居民资深研究员Emerson Brooking将Meta的政治策略称为“惊人退却”。尽管政治帖子较难发现，但这并未解决所有内容问题。因为暴力、性行为与毒品等显眼内容无需用户主动选择即可见到。Meta继续通过安全和保障团队监控其他违规行为。
扎克伯格表示，“人们已经告诉我们，他们想要减少总体上的政治参与度，但仍然能够在我们的平台上进行政治内容的交流”，并强调公司正在实施这样的改变。尽管如此，他并没有减少打击虚假信息的努力。自2016年以来投资了200亿美元用于安全与保障领域，Meta目前有4万名员工专注于此类工作，并且没有在选举安全方面减少人力投入。
扎克伯格的转变是长期发展的结果。从2017年到2021年，他以断续的方式参与国会议员之间的辩论，并为此道歉，因为被指责在2016年的选举中传播了俄罗斯的虚假信息。他的压力和挫败源于未能阻止平台上问题言论对公司的损害以及两党间的政治角力。
面对2020年大选的压力，扎克伯格告诉关键助手，确保选举安全是其最高优先级，并亲自召开每周会议讨论该议题，并指导数百名员工参与选举诚信工作的实施。但政治阴谋论在Facebook和Instagram上依然猖獗。一些由特朗普放大、认为在2020年大选中被窃取的假言论继续传播。“停止偷窃”等Facebook群组吸引了数以十万计追随者，他们宣传着特朗普获胜的错误信息。
国会山暴动后，Meta因散播选举虚假信息而受到指责。两周后的投资人会议，扎克伯格表示考虑采取措施减少Facebook上的政治内容，“人们不希望政治与争斗充斥在服务上”。
随着中期选举临近，2022年 Meta调整了其选举团队结构，并减员三分之一左右；将聚焦于保障政治议题内容的推荐减少。然而，领导人仍是马克·扎克伯格。他个人的帖文倾向于展示他对技术、武术或击剑等新兴趣的热情，而较少涉及政治主题。
扎克伯格专注于人工智能、元宇宙和开源技术的话题。他是否能维持这一策略目前尚不确定。上月向国会递交的信件后，Meta在政治言论中的角色引起两党批评，并且随着哈里斯与特朗普竞选团队继续依赖社交媒体吸引选民，公司可能再次被政治问题所困扰。“我认为他们发现，要么改变自己的行为方式，否则就得接受政治议题的影响。”前Facebook员工Katie Harbath如是说，“因此需要有一个计划来处理它”。
新闻来源：www.nytimes.com
原文地址：How Meta Distanced Itself From Politics
新闻日期：2024-09-24
原文摘要：
In January 2021, after pro-Trump rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol, Mark Zuckerberg announced a new priority for Meta: He wanted to reduce the amount of political content on the company’s apps, including Facebook and Instagram. As the United States hurtles toward November’s election, Mr. Zuckerberg’s plan appears to be working. On Facebook, Instagram and Threads, political content is less heavily featured. App settings have been automatically set to de-emphasize the posts that users see about campaigns and candidates. And political misinformation is harder to find on the platforms after Meta removed transparency tools that journalists and researchers used to monitor the sites. Inside Meta, Mr. Zuckerberg, 40, no longer meets weekly with the heads of election security as he once did, according to four employees. He has reduced the number of full-time employees working on the issue and disbanded the election integrity team, these employees said, though the company says the election integrity workers were integrated into other teams. He has also decided not to have a “war room,” which Meta previously used to prepare for elections. Meta said it will be running an election operations center closer to the November vote. Last month, Mr. Zuckerberg sent a letter to the House Judiciary Committee laying out how he wanted to distance himself and his company from politics. The goal, he said, was to be “neutral” and to not “even appear to be playing a role.” “It’s quite the pendulum swing because a decade ago, everyone at Facebook was desperate to be the face of elections,” said Katie Harbath, chief executive of Anchor Change, a tech consulting firm, who previously worked at Facebook. The result is that the near-constant barrage of headlines that Meta faced in past U.S. elections about its role in political discourse has largely abated. The company is instead recommending more content about sports, cooking, animals and celebrity gossip to its users. Online political conversations this election cycle instead appear to be taking place more prominently on other platforms, such as TikTok and Elon Musk’s X. The campaigns of Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald J. Trump have turned to niche TikTok creators to humanize the candidates and reach young voters. Mr. Musk posts almost daily on X about Mr. Trump, whom he has endorsed for president. Even Zoom, the videoconferencing app, has become a major gathering ground for grass-roots political organizing. Yet political posts, images and videos have not disappeared from Meta’s apps — they are just less visible. Anyone searching Facebook or Instagram for political groups or posts can quickly find them. Misinformation and conspiracy theories still spread on private groups on Facebook and WhatsApp, and the company continues to regularly remove disinformation campaigns from Iran, China, Russia and other countries. During a debate with Ms. Harris in September, Mr. Trump spread false stories that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating pets — a claim that started with a now debunked post on Facebook. The posts have been shared millions of times. Emerson Brooking, a resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, a think tank that studies disinformation online, called Meta’s shift on politics “a stunning retreat.” But while it is harder to find political posts, he said, that has not solved all of its content problems, since “‘explicit’ content — violence, sex, drugs — is available by default,” meaning that users do not have to opt in to see that type of content as they do with politics. Meta has said it continues to guard against other violations of its policies with its safety and security teams. Meta affirmed that it was ratcheting down political posts in public feeds and said engagement on its apps remained robust because people wanted to see less — not more — political content. Its number of users has grown, and revenue continues to spike as the company improves ad targeting using artificial intelligence. “As we’ve said for years, people have told us they want to see less politics overall while still being able to engage with political content on our platforms if they want to, and that’s exactly what we’ve been doing,” said Dani Lever, a Meta spokeswoman. But Meta is not doing less to combat misinformation, she said. The company has 40,000 employees working on safety and security, has invested $20 billion in those areas since 2016 and does not have fewer people working on elections, she said. This month, Meta barred the Russian state media outlets Rossiya Segodnya and RT and affiliated companies from posting on the company’s apps, citing “foreign interference activity” and disinformation campaigns carried out against other countries. “No tech company does more to protect its platforms,” Ms. Lever said, adding, “We have hundreds of people focused on elections work.” Meta’s distancing from politics had been a long time coming. Mr. Zuckerberg spent 2017 through 2021 engaging — in fits and starts — with lawmakers after his company was blamed for spreading Russian disinformation in the 2016 election. Mr. Zuckerberg spent years on an apology tour, including appearing before Congress. But he grew frustrated with how little progress the company made defending itself, four other current and former Meta employees with knowledge of internal deliberations said. Meta was also caught in partisan politics, with Democrats blasting Mr. Zuckerberg for not doing enough to rein in problematic speech across his apps, while Republicans insisted the company was doing too much to curtail it. Before the 2020 election, Mr. Zuckerberg told lieutenants there was no greater priority than securing the elections, an executive close to him said. He had a weekly meeting with top executives to discuss the issue and directed hundreds of employees to work on election integrity, including quashing conspiracy theories and misinformation around the vote. Even so, political conspiracy theories ran wild across Facebook and Instagram. Some were spread by Mr. Trump, who amplified the false idea after the 2020 election that it had been stolen from him. Hundreds of thousands of people were drawn to “Stop the Steal” Facebook groups, which spread the inaccuracy that Mr. Trump had won the election. When the Jan. 6 riot broke out, Meta was blamed for spreading election misinformation. Two weeks later, Mr. Zuckerberg told investors that the company was “considering steps” to reduce political content across Facebook. “People don’t want politics and fighting to take over their experience on our services,” he said. By the 2022 midterm elections, Meta had restructured its election teams and reduced the number of people working on elections, four current and former employees said. It also tested reducing the amount of political content people saw on Facebook in some markets, beginning in Brazil and later in other countries. That year and into 2023, Mr. Zuckerberg cut roughly a third of Meta’s overall work force. Members of the integrity teams were among the first to go. Last year, the company introduced Threads, a social platform widely seen as a competitor to X. Adam Mosseri, who oversees Threads and Instagram, soon posted that both platforms would “avoid making recommendations that could be about politics or political issues.” The apps no longer recommend political content to users from accounts they do not follow, unless the user specifically switches on a setting buried in a menu of the Instagram app. The setting is switched off by default. Mr. Zuckerberg drove these decisions, current and former Meta executives said. His personal posts on Threads and Instagram have tilted to featuring him talking about technology while sporting a new look, complete with gold chains and a revamped wardrobe. He also posts about newer passions, like participating in martial arts or fencing. There is little to no political content. Instead of Mr. Zuckerberg’s weekly meetings, election issues have largely been delegated to Nick Clegg, Meta’s president of global affairs, and Guy Rosen, the chief information security officer. Both have taken over the day-to-day work of overseeing election security issues, two executives at the company said. Mr. Zuckerberg has focused almost all of his public speaking moments on artificial intelligence, the metaverse and open source technologies. It is unclear whether this strategy will last. After Mr. Zuckerberg’s letter to Congress last month, Meta faced some criticism from both parties for its role in political speech. And as the Harris and Trump campaigns lean heavily on social media to attract voters, Meta may find the subject of politics unavoidable. “I think what they’re finding is that they can run, but they can’t hide from it,” Ms. Harbath, the former Facebook employee, said. “So they need to have a plan for how they’re going to deal with it.”
