A New Era for Meta: Navigating Free Speech, Misinformation, and Ethical Advertising

In a surprising move that has sparked heated debate, Mark Zuckerberg announced on his Instagram that Meta will be reducing its levels of censorship and in particular fact-checking on its platform, which includes Facebook and Instagram. This policy shift has raised significant questions about the balance between freedom of speech on social media platforms and the responsibility of these huge social media giants to curb misinformation and hate speech.
Alongside this surprise move, there is a swathe of additional policies coming to Meta advertisers which have the potential to impact many businesses and the way they advertise.
Meta’s Fact-Checking and Reduced Censorship: Implications
During the announcement, Zuckerberg emphasised the importance of enabling open dialogue and reducing Meta’s role as an ‘arbiter of truth’. He argues that excessive censorship undermines the potential of social media and alienates users who feel their opinions are being unfairly suppressed.
The changes he outlined include removing third-party fact-checkers who validate content and statements against the truth to replace this with ‘community notes’. In other words, allowing users to decide what content they wish to engage with through enhanced filtering tools. Zuckerberg also noted that this approach aligned with Meta’s long-standing strategy to decentralise moderation of content, empowering users and communities to self-regulate rather than imposing a top-down moderation approach. Within this statement, he also noted that the impact of moderation often put a lot of unsuspecting users into ‘Facebook Jail’ for mis-moderated content violations.
It is clear that the undertone of Zuckerberg’s announcement is largely politically driven, with the incoming Trump administration it would appear that Meta is reversing its tight moderation, particularly across political content to appease or align with the incoming government. This was made all too clear by his announcement that Meta will be moving moderation teams from California to Texas, with the reasoning that there would be less scrutiny on the bias of content based on where content moderators operate.
While it is apparent Zuckerberg acknowledged the risks involved in opening up censorship on the platforms – he highlighted that the most extreme and illegal content would continue to be removed such as explicit threats, illegal activity, and violence. Meta has committed to investing in AI-driven moderation tools that focus on identifying such high-risk content, ensuring a baseline of safety on its platform.
All of this is very reminiscent of Twitter’s journey to X. With Elon Musk acquiring the platform and opening up censorship, allowing freedom of expression and implementing AI-based filters to reduce the burden of manual content moderation. Whilst efficient, it has also opened up the platform to extreme views, adult content and a platform where brand safety is questionable at best for advertisers. It was for this reason, that X (formerly Twitter) lost 60% of its advertising revenue in the aftermath of Elon’s acquisition. Albeit advertisers are apparently now returning to the platform after the exodus.
With Meta going a similar way, does this open up the floodgates for questionable content and have similar implications for advertiser brand safety? It will be an interesting year for sure and could potentially see advertiser revenue drop over the coming months.
Detailed Targeting Exclusions
Meta started rolling this update out in July 2024 but it will be finalised with all campaigns being affected by 31st January 2025. Meta will be removing detailed targeting exclusions from campaigns. Any
campaign that uses exclusions under detailed targeting e.g. a fashion brand excluding males, or a local plumbing company excluding certain postcodes will not be allowed under the new changes. Based on the change, age, gender, postcode, exclusion targeting, lookalike audiences and saved audiences including interests will be limited or unavailable to exclude with the update. Advertisers will get a red flag in the ad account for any impacted campaigns and will need to update targeting before 31st January 2025 to comply.
New Meta Advertising Policies for Health & Wellbeing
Starting in January 2025, Meta has introduced an updated advertising policy for Health and Wellbeing advertisers that target certain conditions, e.g. Obesity, Alzheimer’s, Arthritis, and many more. Although there are no firm lists of companies or products that will be impacted by this new policy, it does suggest that some examples of impact may be felt across the following:
- Health and Wellness Brands: Companies selling supplements, fitness programs, or wellness products.
- Pharmaceutical and Medical Services: Telemedicine platforms, pharmacies, or healthcare providers.
- Legal Firms: Personal injury law firms may fall under broader health-related restrictions.
- Fitness and Lifestyle Apps: Apps focused on workouts, dieting, or mental health
The policy update will limit optimisation to purchase events – e.g. add to cart, purchase on campaigns targeting health and wellbeing products or conditions. Meta is not restricting the category entirely. Instead, advertisers will need to move campaigns away from bottom of the funnel targeting against purchase intent to either reach or traffic metric-based optimisation for campaigns e.g. landing page views or clicks.
Advertisers will likely receive a flag in their account for any violation if they are affected by the change and will need to comply by changing the pixel and campaign optimisation.
This change, albeit aimed at protecting users, has the potential to have a significant impact on the performance of advertising efficiency for many businesses in this space. With the inability to track purchase or sign-up conversion events, instead relying solely on traffic-based optimisation for campaigns. It also has a likely impact of affecting edge cases around the category including charities of specific conditions, e.g. Cancer or Heart charities that advertise on Meta, supplement companies selling legitimate products and potentially even some Gym and Fitness organisations.
Special Category Customer List Purging
Starting in March 2025, there will be restrictions on customer lists (1st Party data) audiences for special categories including Housing, Employment, Financial products and Credit campaigns. This was announced back in October 2024 but will be brought into effect in March 2025.
For advertisers that fall within these special categories, New and edited campaigns/ad sets must use customer list custom audiences that follow the requirements, or you may not be able to publish. If you are unable to publish for this reason, you will see errors in Ads Manager, the Marketing API and other platforms with instructions. Edits to ads (creatives) will not trigger restrictions.
Another key restriction for these categories will be that using shared customer list custom audiences from different business portfolios will not be permitted for ads about housing, employment, and financial products and services.
While special category advertisers based in the US or promoting ads to the US will be required to certify that their customer lists are not based on types of information that Meta does now allow, e.g. consumer report information for each ad set.
It is shaping up to be a whirlwind of a year for Meta and will be interesting to see the impact of this swathe of changes through the platforms. As always, our experts are on hand if you have any questions or want to understand the potential impact to your Meta advertising.
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