Leadership Conference letter to Meta on Content Moderation

A pdf copy of the letter is available here

May 8, 2025

Mark Zuckerberg
Founder, Chairman, and Chief Executive Officer
Meta Platforms, Inc.
1 Meta Way
Menlo Park, CA 94025

Dear Mr. Zuckerberg,

On behalf of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, a coalition charged by its diverse membership of more than 240 national organizations to promote and protect the rights of all persons in the United States, and the more than 16,000 individuals across the United States who have signed onto our petition, I urge you to restore Meta’s full content moderation efforts and fact checking to stop the spread of dangerous lies and falsehoods on your platform. Unfortunately, we’ve witnessed your and Meta’s retreat from the commitments you made to protect your three billion-plus users and their well-being, with April 7 marking the official end of professional fact checking across Meta platforms in the United States.

Your decision to cut content moderation and fact checking across Meta’s platforms in the U.S. sends a clear message to malicious actors that they can run rampant, spreading dangerous lies and falsehoods on Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp. You are exposing vulnerable communities—both online and offline—to hate speech, dangerous rhetoric, threats of and real violence, and harmful comments about immigrants, trans youth, and people seeking abortions that will long outlive Meta. That will be your legacy.

Your strategy of replacing content moderation with Elon Musk’s “Community Notes” will fail, just as it continues to fail on X. We understand that Meta started rolling out Community Notes in the U.S. over the past several weeks. The data are clear: Community Notes, without professional fact checking and content moderation, are ineffective in combating online mis- and disinformation. A study from the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) found that in the last election cycle on X, accurate notes were left off of 74 percent of misleading and false posts about the U.S. election and those misleading posts amassed two billion views. Researchers from CCDH also estimate that Facebook and Instagram users could encounter at least 277 million more instances of hate speech and other harmful content each year because of your decision.

One of the clearest examples of the failure of Community Notes is the false and bigoted rumor about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio that dominated the last election cycle and produced threats to Haitian community members and to children in public school buildings. The disinformation began when an X account called End Wokeness constructed a false narrative out of an unverified post from a small Facebook group and a picture of a Black man holding a goose. The account spread that lie to their three million followers. The post on X did not receive a user-submitted Community Note debunking the claim until four days later, but by that point, the damage was done. This false and hateful narrative spread like wildfire into mainstream media and politically-motivated advertising campaigns, resulting in both threats of and real violence. In this instance, Community Notes were too slow and not enough to prevent this false, anti-immigrant narrative from paving the way for dangerous policies like the SAVE Act, which would limit voters’ access to the ballot box, and the terrifying ICE abductions we’ve witnessed.

Social media platforms are supposed to be places we go to connect, to learn from each other, and to organize. Instead, in capitulating to the extremist MAGA agenda and intimidation by President Donald Trump, you’ve made Meta’s platforms into places where mis- and disinformation flourish alongside hate speech. Exposing your users to this dangerous content is a violation of your own policy and of basic human decency. Your users are taking notice.

We’ve had enough. The civil rights community, together with your users, demand that you defy the concerted intimidation and disinformation tactics of extremists who undermine the communal space that Meta owns and controls; take accountability for your role in sowing the seeds of hate, falsehoods, and lies; and earn back your users’ trust by reinstating commonsense content moderation and professional fact checking. Otherwise, you can be sure that you, too, will go down with your sinking ship.

We would welcome a response detailing your plans to protect our civil rights and to promote truth and safety on the platforms you control. Alejandra Montoya-Boyer at The Leadership Conference ([email protected]) is available to answer questions, but our sincere hope is that you act.

Sincerely,
Maya Wiley President and CEO