Meta's moderation shake-up: What's next for social media strategy?

Mark Zuckerberg dominated the headlines recently, finally wrenching some attention from fellow tech billionaire Elon Musk, with the announcement that Meta would end Facebook and Instagram’s third-party fact checking programme. In a video posted to Instagram, Zuckerberg also announced the introduction of community notes in the US and an increase in recommendations of political content across the platforms.

The move is the latest signal that social media is becoming increasingly politicised from the top down, with CEOs becoming more visible and vocal at the same time, a trend driven largely by Elon Musk’s outspoken support of Donald Trump and embracing of conservative and reactionary talking points. In this volatile digital landscape, how can brands and marketers adapt to the new content norms?

Community notes have been used on X (formerly Twitter) since 2021 and have been championed by Musk as an effective alternative to other forms of content moderation since he took over the platform in 2022. But in September last year, marketing insights and analytics company Kantar found that marketer confidence in X had declined significantly, driven by a loss of trust and brand safety concerns.

Just 4% of marketers felt that X provided brand safety and they’re moving their spend elsewhere in response. It’s unsurprising - considering the unpredictability of X under Musk’s leadership, the lack of standardised moderation risks brands rubbing shoulders with content that is distressing or harmful, or simply goes against carefully considered brand values. By following X’s lead, Meta risks alienating advertisers and forcing them to make more nuanced decisions about which platforms they use. 

Of course, advertising doesn’t exist in a vacuum; the other (arguably more significant) factor driving decisions about where to funnel efforts is the response from users to content changes. In X’s case, Musk’s combative style and magnification of extreme right wing figures led to mass behavioural shift, as users in the UK and US responded to inflammatory posts by leaving the platform for new pastures. Rival app BlueSky saw a million signups a day in November and has continued to grow since, and although it remains too small to do more than nip at the ankles of its supersized competitors, marketers are keeping an eye on its potential. 

For Facebook, though, abandoning moderation programmes doesn’t just allow Zuckerberg to dine comfortably at Mar-a-Lago: it’s an admission that those programmes were doing very little to keep AI-generated spam, clickfarms and scams at bay at all. A 2024 investigation by 404 Media found that Meta had frozen out experts it had hired just a few years earlier to lead moderation efforts.

This has very clearly affected the platform’s atmosphere. Once the trailblazing social media monolith, tech writer Jason Koebler now likens Facebook to a “dead mall”. In other words, a colossus of a place, increasingly filled with bewildered people navigating slightly surreal, junk-filled spaces. 

Although still sitting at roughly 3 billion monthly active users worldwide, a staggering number, Facebook’s growth has stalled in the past few years. Whilst its user base is undeniably aging - the percentage of US teens using the app has dropped from 71% in 2013-14 to 33% in 2023 - it still captures the attention of 39% of the world’s active internet users. Scrolling might now be a mess of suggested algorithmic content, but it can still act as a key mediator between brands and their audience, with 59% of users reporting reaching out to brands via the platform.

So where does that leave the 93% of social media marketers using Facebook Ads? What happens when the numbers keep going up, but they don’t account for the sheer amount of visual noise, only made worse by patchy content moderation? It’s a conundrum that highlights the limits of a purely quantitative approach; one that demands a holistic understanding of social media, where a broad knowledge of the landscape allows brands to identify where they need to be, but an in-depth understanding of fewer platforms allows for far more meaningful engagement.

With the social media landscape rapidly fragmenting, brands must be confident in their choice of platforms and, crucially, able to defend the choice to show up there (or able to flexibly shift as the landscape does). Part of that is acknowledging that brands don’t just respond to what happens on the internet, but are actively part of creating it. It might require some bold decision making, especially if there’s years of strategising, planning and posting that’s gone into these spaces, but the reward is finding an audience that is less apathetic, more engaged, and more curious.

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