Zuckerberg's meta is under attack from human rights activists

Mark Zuckerberg's massive layoffs at Meta have raised concerns that the company's content moderation could suffer. Photo: Mark Lennihan/AP

Meta's Mark Zuckerberg has been accused by human rights activists of «neglecting» a key Internet safety initiative designed to detect fake news and disinformation.

The social network's parent company, Meta, is said to have left its trusted partner program «significantly under-resourced and understaffed.»

Internews, a non-profit group working to expand media freedom, said that Meta's lack of resources led to «operational glitches» and long response times when suppressing disinformation campaigns.

The tech giant has laid off more than 20,000 employees after CEO Mark Zuckerberg kicked off a «year of efficiency» to cut costs and boost the company's falling stock price.

Massive job cuts have raised concerns that the company's content moderation may suffer as a result, although Internews reports that many of the problems predated the layoffs.

The report says, «Given the problems… cost cuts would further jeopardize the program and hurt Trusted Partners' performance.»

Internews reports on complaints of misinformation about conflicts such as the Tigray War in Ethiopia. , sometimes went unanswered for months, although warnings about content distribution in Ukraine were usually resolved quickly.

«Meta partners are deeply disappointed with the way the program works,» said Internews' Rafik Copeland. «We and other trusted partners are ready to work productively with Meta to address the issues raised in this review.»

The tech giant's Trusted Partner Program includes 645 charities, news groups, and fact-checking organizations.

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In response to the report, Meta said some of the findings «do not represent a complete or accurate picture.»< /p>

In its responses included in the report, Meta stated that it is «working to develop new ways to share information about the overall impact and effectiveness» of the program.

The Facebook owner also acknowledged the need for «clear reporting rules and tracking mechanisms for trusted partner reporting» and said it is developing «standard reporting templates tailored to different types of malicious content» to further simplify partner feedback.

Meta said: «We welcome constructive dialogue with any of our trusted partners.»

Internews launched a review of the program after being disappointed with Meta's response speed. It says it took Meta 200 days to respond to its list of questions.

Meta said the Covid pandemic has increased response time from 2020 to 2021 and expects reports to be processed within one to five days.

The tech giant faced criticism for failing to stop the spread of misinformation and hate speech in 2017 in Myanmar amid an upsurge in violence against the Rohingya minority.

Meta previously said that has committed $100 million to build a global fact-checking network and has a team of approximately 15,000 content reviewers.