‘The question is: do we want to give that power to platforms, or not?’: Former Meta leader Jena Wuu

We discuss why content moderation alone won’t fix the misinformation problem, and how institutions can build trust in the digital age

Substack has been a boon for finding writers and thinkers with interesting and, often, surprising perspectives on how technology is shaping the world around us.

I’m happy it led me to Jena Wuu’s Substack, Feed For Thought, which is all about how expertise and trust are evolving in the digital age.

Jena has worked in tech and public policy for 15 years, and formerly served as head of global information ecosystem programs at Meta, a role focused on improving access to trustworthy information during big world events such as COVID-19 and the war in Ukraine.

What initially drew me to Jena is her thinking on the efficacy of content moderation in stemming the tide of misinformation on social media. Platforms have faced backlash at various points over the years for failing to protect users from misleading or harmful content, but Jena argues that pressuring platforms to moderate content better is only part of the solution. The other part — getting enough credible information into online spaces — is often overlooked.

This was a wide-ranging conversation, and I learned a lot during the hour we spent together. We talked about trust in the digital age, why institutions need to be more present online, and how individual actions such as liking and commenting, though seemingly unimportant, are powerful in shaping the online ecosystem.

The interview has been condensed for length and clarity.

Can you kick us off by explaining what’s meant by an information ecosystem and who the various actors are shaping public understanding today?

The information ecosystem is essentially anywhere where somebody consumes media. I don’t see a distinction between entertainment or something like news, because I think that every piece of media that you consume informs your understanding and perception of the world.

So that can be anything from TV, films, radio, newspapers to digital platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok. I also include things like WhatsApp groups, Discord and Slack groups too — anywhere where information flows.

A friend of mine recently asked me what the difference is between media and content, but I actually think they’re the same thing. It’s just the connotation is different. Media sounds like something official, from an institution, whereas content is peer-to-peer, and often associated with influencers or social platforms.

You’ve argued on your Substack that authority is no longer necessarily owned by institutions but is earned in various spaces on the internet. Can you explain more about that shift and how it’s changed how people decide who or what to trust?

Authority is basically a mixture of expertise and trust. Previously, if you had expertise it was connoted by your affiliation with an institution, whether that’s a university or media outlet. Expertise is essentially knowledge learned through education, training and experience. Trust is earned through somebody believing that you have their interests in mind and are acting in goodwill.

These two things used to be combined and that’s what created authority. But now, these things are earned separately — having credentials alone is not enough to earn somebody’s trust, it’s just one factor. Other factors would be: do you seem relatable to me? Does it seem like you’re experiencing something I’m going through? Do I know you or are you familiar to me? Do other people I trust recommend you? My hypothesis is that institutions have so long relied on who they are to have trust that they haven’t really invested in earning it.

Reuters Institute’s 2026 Digital News Report shows that trust towards news is at its lowest point since 2015. Meanwhile, half of survey respondents get their news from creators and, increasingly, people are turning to AI chatbots for news. Some might refer to this as a crisis of trust. What do you think about that?

It could be a crisis of trust or it could be an opportunity for people to really examine who they trust and why. In the past we would just trust institutions because they were the institution, but now there have been challenges with institutions and legacy media for a long time. I think that it actually could be an opportunity for people to interrogate the decisions they make and how they participate on online platforms.

In your role at Facebook, you devised a program to address misinformation and disinformation. What did that involve, and what challenges did you face?

There’s a difference between disinformation and misinformation. Disinformation is false information that is purposely perpetuated for nefarious reasons. Misinformation is just false information that’s shared without necessarily a negative intent.

At Facebook, I created an information ecosystem program out of recognition that there were some gaps in the way the company, but also policymakers, were thinking about the “misinformation problem.” There was so much focus on removing bad content. The whole industry has invested a lot in third party fact-checking, which is an important part of the ecosystem, but the whole thing is a balancing act.

While content moderation is important, it’s not enough by itself. It relies on misinformation to surface and get some kind of circulation to begin with for it to get removed. But it also relies on an assumption that there is sufficient credible information online that’s there to take its place — and that is simply not accurate.

At the scale that digital platforms operate — and that people are using these platforms to look for information across different cultural contexts and languages — we cannot rely on journalists alone to fill this gap.

So the emphasis has been placed on content moderation, when we should also be looking at the other side of the equation: getting more credible information on the internet?

Right, and I think institutions whose objective it is to produce knowledge for the purpose of public benefit need to communicate that knowledge effectively.

What I found at Meta was… When Covid-19 broke out in December 2019, Mark Zuckerberg made this commitment to the World Health Organisation to provide as many free ads as it needed to disseminate accurate information about Covid-19, public health and preventive health measures. We then quickly expanded it to national health ministries because the pandemic was a global issue, but the response was being managed on the national or local levels.

The original assumption we made was that the institutions lacked the budget to buy ads, and so it was supposed to be an ads donation program. But what we quickly learned was that 80% of the public health agencies we were working with had never used social media for the purpose of spreading public information; they’d only really viewed it as a marketing or fundraising tool.

To me, that was really shocking: for as much focus as there is on these platforms as sources of misinformation, there was very little focus on them as sources of information. So we ended up expanding the programme to help institutions create Facebook accounts, and teach them how to create good content to share credible information.

There’s a lot of distrust for platforms which is perfectly understandable. But if we say, to use Facebook as an example, that it’s Mark Zuckerberg’s responsibility to moderate content, then we’re also giving him the power to decide what is credible information or not. We’re basically giving him permission to create Facebook in his visage, like Elon Musk has done with X. So, the question is: do we actually want to give that power to platforms, or not?

You’ve said that part of the problem with getting enough credible information online is that a lot of institutions aren’t present in the online spaces where a lot of information is created and shared. Where do you see that absence having the biggest consequences?

I think the most acute examples are in health, science and in a lot of the conversation about climate. People are going to trust what’s familiar to them.

It’s really interesting to look at how brands have built consumers’ trust; they’ve invested a lot in figuring it out. I think there’s a lot of lessons we could take from the private sector into trust-building in the public sector.

For example, the marketing rule of seven states that a customer needs an interaction with your brand seven times to recognise your brand and to internalise your message. A successful campaign at Meta would be two impressions — the number of times your ad was displayed on a user’s screen — per week for four weeks which is about the same as this rule of seven.

For me it’s about trying to change the culture within institutions so that they feel that participating online is a safe and legitimate way to build trust.

What are the barriers to getting experts like scientists, researchers and doctors to participate more effectively online and how might those be overcome?

Most doctors and professors and public servants who work within very traditionally hierarchical work environments are not going to become full-time content creators. One, it takes a lot of time to make thoughtful content. And two, being a spokesperson is often delegated to comms teams or reserved for leaders or designated spokespeople.

In that kind of work environment, the implication to experts is that public communication is someone else’s job. And when organisations lack a clear policy on how individual employees can talk about their expertise or work, two things can happen. First, many won’t speak or write publicly about their work, either out of fear that it’s not condoned by their employer or because they don’t view it as part of their scope of work. Second, those who do engage publicly may cause situations that pose risk to the institution, like if they misrepresent its position on a topic or engage in inappropriate behaviour.

That’s why I advise every institution to create a clear policy for how their staff can talk about their work online. It gives permission and acknowledges online engagement as normal professional behaviour, while also building frameworks and recourse that protect the institution.

I think providing training to enable people to learn about the information ecosystem is also helpful. For example, some doctors I’ve spoken to feel very frustrated that their patient doesn’t want to vaccinate their baby because they were listening to some kind of wellness influencer. When I asked them what kind of training they get on digital communications, or why they think people would trust an influencer rather than their doctor, they didn’t know, because they don’t get any kind of education on this.

This has such big ramifications on their ability to do their work. Public understanding and public sentiment impacts public policy, it impacts funding decisions and shapes whose expertise gets taken seriously.

So I think it starts with recognising that digital literacy and an understanding of the information ecosystem are core professional skills for any public servant. It needs to be incorporated into graduate school programs and medical programs as part of professional development, alongside content skills training.

What are the different ways in which individuals can intentionally participate to improve information quality on the internet?

People often understand their role in the ecosystem as binary: you’re either in front of the camera or you’re in the audience. But now, in the digital world, all of our roles are much more fluid than that, and participation exists on a spectrum. Even people who never post content shape which creators and content get amplified through their actions online.

Participating doesn’t mean you have to spend more time online or become a full-time creator; it’s about what platforms you use and how you engage with them. For example, Meta counts watching a video for more than three seconds as ‘watched’ — that’s a signal to the platform that the content is worth sharing with other people.

Every action has different values. Liking, sharing, commenting are all high value signals to platforms because you’re generating new content that’s creating more engagement opportunities with that post. So, if you are following someone who is making content you find useful, engage with it.

You may not view yourself as a creator, but you’re still contributing to the ecosystem, even if you’re not creating content yourself.

So for you, it’s all about empowering the individual in the end?

Yeah, and reframing what participation is. There’s so much conversation right now about technology and AI being forced on us. I really want people to feel like this is not something that’s happening to you — you have a lot of power and control over your relationship with these platforms.

Also, it’s perfectly legitimate to be spending time on these platforms; there’s a lot of value that can be derived from them.

Generative AI is already tilting the balance of the information ecosystem, making it harder to discern between what’s real and what’s not. But it’s also provided creators with new ways of creating content. What risks and opportunities do you see there?

AI is for sure disrupting the creative class and how people create content. Like with food or fashion, I think we’re going to end up with tiers of content. We’re going to have fast content which is cheap to make, easily consumed and quickly discarded, and we’re going to have slow content — that is more like an artisan craft with an original perspective, but is more demanding to produce and consume. I think there is legitimate space for both.

There’s a lot of snobbery about where people are getting their information. I hear a lot of people lamenting about how people are getting their news or getting their research from Facebook or from Instagram. And I understand that. But at the same time, there are other forces at play here.

We don’t work in a time anymore where everybody can be home at 6pm for dinner with the family and watch the evening news. People are working multiple shifts. We’re busier than ever. And people are having to get their information in small snippets while they’re on a break between shifts or when they’re in the bathroom.

There’s also a major literacy issue in a lot of countries. In the US, over half of American adults read below a sixth-grade level and nearly a fifth of adults in Germany read at literacy level 1, which means they’re able to read short pieces on familiar topics.

When we’re dealing with these bigger structural challenges, it’s not very productive to shame people for engaging in content that’s simpler when they just don’t have the time, the mental energy, or the literacy skills to be able to engage with lengthier or more complicated things.

However, it’s really on the institutions and the experts who care about serving the public to make sure that these different content classes are not resulting in different information classes. We have a responsibility to ensure information equity for everyone.

I believe that information is life-saving. If institutions and experts remain absent or passive on digital platforms, it actually causes harm because it makes credible information harder to find by the people who need it. That goes against the purpose of entities and professions that exist to serve the public.