On January 7, 2025, Meta announced sweeping changes to its content moderation policies, including the end of third-party fact-checking in the U.S., and rollbacks to its hate speech policy globally that remove protections for women, people of color, trans people, and more. In the absence of data from Meta, we decided to go straight to users to assess if and how harmful content is manifesting on Meta platforms in the wake of January rollbacks.
Different applications employ different strategies for sifting content.
Facebook (and Google) pivoting to pure engagement bait was a more recent development, closer to 2018+, and synced up with their AI obsessions.