The meta is shut down its third-party fact-checking program on Instagram and Facebook, the company announced Tuesday, and will instead rely on Community Notes, a user-driven moderation system similar to that used by ‘immigration.
“It’s time to return to our roots around free expression on Facebook and Instagram,” Zuckerberg said in a videoreferencing his 2019 speech at Georgetown University in support of free speech.
About a decade ago, including during the first Trump administration, Meta implemented complex content moderation systems in response to societal and political pressures. Zuckerberg said in the video that it hasn’t always worked as desired: “The problem with complex systems is that they make mistakes. Even if they accidentally censor just 1% of messages, that’s a loss. millions of people. We have reached a point where there are too many errors and too much censorship.
Citing the 2024 US elections, in which Donald Trump won a second term as president, as a “cultural tipping point”, Zuckerberg said the company would prioritize speech by simplifying policies, reducing errors and by restoring freedom of expression.
These changes come two weeks before Trump’s inauguration and as Meta faces continued criticism for its handling of disinformation; allegations of political bias; and criticism regarding the broader societal impact of its platforms.
One of the biggest challenges for social media companies Over the past decade, decisions have been made about what content is allowed on their platforms and what content to remove, including political and medical misinformation and hate speech. Critics have long accused social networks, particularly Facebook, Twitter (now X) and YouTube, of censoring speech. Others, however, said some form of surveillance was crucial in the face of a deadly pandemic and a growing wave of misinformation.
Community Notes Overview
In the US, Meta will now implement Community Notes, where users write and rate notes to provide context to potentially misleading posts. In a blog post, Joel Kaplan, Meta’s director of global affairs, outlined the system’s safeguards, emphasizing that it requires agreement from people with diverse perspectives to avoid bias. Users can register as contributors starting today.
Meta also plans to adjust how it enforces policies to reduce censorship errors. Serious violations, like those involving terrorism and child exploitation, will still rely on automation, but less serious issues will require human reporting before action is taken.
Kaplan echoed Zuckerberg, emphasizing a “more personalized approach to political content” that allows users to control what they see.
“Meta platforms are designed to be places where people can express themselves freely,” he wrote. “It can be complicated… But it’s freedom of expression.”
Additionally, Meta will personalize how users view political and civic content, reversing its 2021 reduction of these posts. Kaplan called this approach “brutal.” Content from followed pages and people will now be ranked like any other post, based on likes and views.
Kaplan said the fact-checking program, launched in 2016 to combat misinformation, has become a tool that sometimes stifles legitimate political debate.
“Over time, we ended up with too much fact-checked content for people to understand that this was legitimate political speech and debate,” he wrote. “Our system then led to real consequences in the form of intrusive labels and reduced distribution. A program intended to inform too often became a tool of censorship.”
Zuckerberg said it would take time to adopt the new approach and that there was still a lot of illegal material to be found on how best to remove it. “These are complex systems; they will never be perfect,” he said.
