Facebook Has No ‘Shadow Banning’ Policy

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a three-hour interview on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast that Facebook does not have a "shadow banning" policy, but admitted that there are blockages by mistake.

Podcast host Rogan asked Zuckerberg if "shadow banning" happens on social media platforms such as Facebook. Zuckerberg 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 referred to posts that are flagged as false, misinformative or are in categories of harmful content. Such posts are usually flagged for foreign interference in politics, terrorism, child pornography and violations of intellectual property.

Zuckerberg said:

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.

Also, some posts don't reach the public because they're not very good.

He continued:

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.