Meta AI Support Assistant is coming to Facebook and Instagram: Here's what it means for users

Meta is overhauling how it moderates content across Facebook and Instagram. The company has announced that it plans to scale back its use of third-party human reviewers in favour of advanced artificial intelligence (AI) systems. The company said that it is also rolling out the Meta AI support assistant globally on both of its , providing 24/7 help for account issues like updating your password and settings for your profile.Meta has used AI for content moderation for years primarily to catch spam and abusive posts at scale. But it has also relied on human moderators from outside companies, including consulting giant Accenture, to manually review and remove content that violates its policies. Meta also noted that it recently began testing a more powerful generation of AI tools and that those tools are performing noticeably better than its existing systems across a range of challenging moderation tasks. Meta claims that these more advanced AI systems can do all of this in languages spoken by 98% of people online, which is beyond the previous coverage of around 80 languages.“Over the next few years, we will deploy more advanced AI systems across our apps to transform our approach to content enforcement, more accurately finding and removing severe content violations like scams and illegal content, so people see less of them,” the company said.As that rollout happens, Meta will cut back on the external vendors it currently relies on for content enforcement. “As we do this, we'll reduce our reliance on third-party vendors for content enforcement and focus on strengthening our internal systems and workforce,” the company added.Meta was careful to frame the transition as a shift in how human judgment is used, rather than an elimination of it.“AI doesn't replace human judgment,” the company said, adding that people will continue to play a central role in the most sensitive and high-stakes decisions — including appeals when accounts are disabled and cases that need to be reported to law enforcement.“While we’ll still have people who review content, these systems will be able to take on work that’s better-suited to technology, like repetitive reviews of graphic content or areas where adversarial actors are constantly changing their tactics, such as with illicit drugs sales or scams,” it explained.“Experts will design, train, oversee, and evaluate our AI systems, measuring performance and making the most complex, high‑impact decisions. For example, people will continue to play a key role in how we make the highest risk and most critical decisions, such as appeals of account disablement or reports to law enforcement,” the company added.For the average person scrolling through Facebook or Instagram, the practical implication may be that harmful content like scams, fake celebrity accounts, sexually explicit material and other policy violations — should be caught and removed faster and more consistently than before. AI systems can review content at a scale and speed that no human workforce can match.However, their may be risks with AI moderation. For example, over-enforcement, false positives and the removal of legitimate content are concerns with automated systems.