Meta has revealed it shifted its platforms to “reactive” moderation of posts containing hate speech, including antisemitism, to allow for freer debate.
Hate speech, including antisemitism, is treated differently from “truly heinous” content such as the glorification of terrorism on some of the biggest social media platforms, Meta has revealed.
The digital giant, which owns Facebook, Instagram and Threads, has faced a grilling at Australia’s antisemitism royal commission over controversial changes to its content moderation policy, which is allowing more hate speech to slip through the cracks.
The previous moderation system was over-policing political speech and had shut down Jewish communities trying to speak out against antisemitism, Meta’s global director of core policy told the inquiry on Monday.
“They were trying to engage in counter-speech, and unfortunately our systems were affecting them,” Benjamin Good said.
Under changes introduced in January 2025, Meta shifted to “reactive” moderation for most types of content in a bid to allow freer debate about issues such as migration and gender, meaning potentially hateful posts will stay up until they are reported by users.
It also removed fact-checkers and promoted more political content.
More egregious posts, including child sexual abuse material and the promotion of terrorism, are proactively removed using artificial intelligence, Mr Good told counsel assisting Richard Lancaster SC.
“In proactive enforcement, it is the gold standard to remove violating content before it is viewed,” he said.
“However, it carries risks when we remove content proactively. If we are wrong, if the content does not violate, then there is a significant risk of over-enforcement.”
Mr Good, who dialled in from the US via video link, said the social media giant found users would often use “Zionist” as a coded term for Jews, complicating efforts to crack down on antisemitism.
“(We) found that many people were using the word ‘Zionist’ as a coded term in content in order to evade our enforcement against claims that Jewish people have undue control,” he said.
Roughly 0.02 per cent of content is classified as hateful conduct, Mr Good added.
Confronted with figures showing a 79 per cent reduction in the amount of hateful conduct on which Meta has taken action since the January 2025 changes, Mr Good agreed the figure was in the ballpark.
Asked what was driving the change, Mr Good said he did not know and did not want to speculate because of the complexity of the content moderation system.
Meta says it has provided about 650 documents and three statements to the royal commission.
Its large online presence reaches millions of Australians each day through Facebook, Instagram, Threads and popular messaging apps WhatsApp and Messenger.
In June, Meta was named the second most distrusted brand in Australia, behind Optus, in a Roy Morgan survey of businesses.
Monday’s other witnesses are Tiat Oon Ooi from the streaming platform Kick and Tal-Or Cohen Montemayor from online antisemitism tracker CyberWell.
Tiat Oon Ooi told the Royal Commission the livestreaming platform had acted on only a small fraction of reports involving doxxing, hate or terrorism. He said Kick recorded 1774 enforcement actions from 179,914 reports between January 1 and May 27, arguing the low rate reflected large numbers of false, vague or bad-faith complaints rather than weak enforcement.
Mr Ooi said users often reported streamers they disliked without pointing to rule-breaking content and maintained it was “very unlikely” the figures showed poor moderation. Under questioning, he could not say clearly whether a stream describing Jews as “evil rats and subhumans” would breach Kick’s hate speech rules.
Australia’s general manager for Anthropic, the owner of the large language model Claude, appeared last week.
The commission had previously been told some social media platforms could not identify antisemitic posts that used symbols or deliberate misspellings to spread antisemitism, even with the help of AI.
But Anthropic’s Theo Hourmouzis said its chatbot could detect and even intercept such content.
The Sydney hearings are examining hateful speech online and in traditional media, with public broadcasters ABC and SBS expected to appear later this week.
The fourth hearing block, in Melbourne from July 13, will focus on experiences of antisemitism at universities before a fifth block, in Sydney from July 20, examines security arrangements for the Jewish community.
Facebook Australia policy director Mia Garlick will also appear.
By Zac de Silva, Ben McKay and Lucinda Garbutt-Young/AAP