Meta’s policy director Benjamin Good rejected claims that 2025 policy changes led to more antisemitic content. Good made his comments during his testimony in Monday’s hearing of the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion.
Meta significantly changed its approach to moderating hateful content in January 2025, shifting away from proactive enforcement toward a model that relies on user reports and reactive enforcement. Meta said that the new approach was intended to reduce over-enforcement and to better protect freedom of expression.
As part of the policy overhaul, Meta scaled back the automated detection and removal of certain categories of potentially hateful or harmful content, reserving proactive enforcement primarily for severe violations such as terrorism and the sexual exploitation of children.
Jewish advocacy groups report more antisemitic content being shared on Meta's platforms
When told by Counsel-assisting Richard Lancaster SC that Jewish advocacy groups report more antisemitic content being shared on Meta’s platforms, Good replied: “I would not characterize the engagements [with the Jewish groups] that way.”
“Those conversations I would describe as overwhelmingly productive and constructive,” he said.
Good also said the aim of the policy changes was not to alter Meta’s approach to antisemitism.
“They were aimed at making small changes to the policy that would allow people to say things on our platforms that they were saying in Congress, on the news, and the goal of that was because we want people to be able to debate these political topics,” he told the commission.
Good told the commission that, after October 7, he personally heard from Jewish communities, who had told him that they had been experiencing content removals when speaking out against antisemitism, “and that was an extremely negative experience.”
“Here they were, trying to engage in counter-speech, and unfortunately, our systems were affecting them.”
Good was shown two graphs depicting the removal rates of hate material before and after Mark Zuckerberg’s January 2025 policy changes.
A 'plausible explanation' for 79% drop in removal of hate material
The graph showed that Meta removed 5.8 million items from Facebook that could be classed as hate speech between October and December 2024. Between July and September 2025, only 1.2 million “items of hateful conduct were actioned,” meaning there was a 79% drop in the removal of hate material.
Royal Commissioner Virginia Bell asked Good for a “plausible explanation” for the 79% drop.
“I truly don’t know, and I don’t want to speculate,” he responded.
“The reactive approach differs from the proactive approach in that it is less prone to over-enforcement, and that was the problem motivating the changes,” Good told the commission.
He agreed that there may be content that Meta does not remove because it is not reported, but said, “I do want to emphasize we are very carefully monitoring the extent to which that is the case.”
In April 2026, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) revealed that Meta’s policy changes have led to weakened content moderation on Instagram.
According to ADL’s research, Instagram failed to remove 93% of hateful and extremist content reported by the ADL’s researchers, a figure the watchdog said demonstrated a “systemic failure” to protect users.
“Instagram is developing into a hub for hate and antisemitism, and our research demonstrates this clearly,” Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO and national director of the ADL, said in a statement. “Meta’s moderation rollback has created a permissive environment where extremists thrive, bad actors turn Instagram’s own features into amplification tools for hate, and as a result, vulnerable communities suffer.”
While Elon Musk’s decision to permit formerly banned extremist account-holders to return to X has made his platform the most prominent avatar of social media’s abandonment of moderation, Meta has recently undergone a similar shift. The ADL has sparred with both Musk and X in the past as well.