Mark Zuckerberg said Facebook doesn’t have a “shadow ban” policy, but admitted mistakes 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 the “shadow ban” happened on social media platforms like Facebook. He replied: “There’s no policy that is a ‘shadow ban’ so I think that’s a slang term. But that might refer to some of the demotions [of posts] which we are talking about”. Zuckerberg was referring to posts flagged as false, misinformative or classified as harmful. They include foreign nations meddling in politics, terrorism, child pornography, and blatant infringement of intellectual property. If a post “is flagged as false by a fact checker, it will appear somewhat less,” Zuckerberg said. “But if there’s some history on a page, then there might be some kind of broader policy that applies.” He continued: “Unfortunately, there are a lot of mistakes, and part of the issue is that there are 3.5 billion people using these services, and if we’re wrong 0.1% of the time, there are still millions of mistakes… and that sucks.” It also blamed “some bug in the system or some system not working as it should,” for posts being banned. “It’s a real issue, but it’s not an ideological one.” Zuckerberg said some posts have failed to reach a wide audience simply because they aren’t very good. “Empowering people runs very deep in the company’s ethos,” he said. “Whenever we mess it up — which we do, often — we pay the price for that, and people don’t like what we do, and we have to stop them.” 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 went public on the New York Stock Exchange in 2012 and was renamed Meta last year. It also owns Instagram and WhatsApp.
