Meta is ending its fact-checking program in favor of a 'community notes' system similar to X's
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a series of major changes to the company's moderation policies and practices Tuesday, citing a shifting political and social landscape and a desire to embrace free speech.
Zuckerberg said Meta will end its fact-checking program with trusted partners and replace it with a community-driven system similar to X’s Community Notes.
The company is also changing its content moderation policies around political topics and undoing changes that reduced the amount of political content in user feeds, Zuckerberg said.
The changes will affect Facebook and Instagram, two of the largest social media platforms in the world, each boasting billions of users, as well as Threads.
Zuckerberg pointed to the election as a major influence on the company's decision and criticized "governments and legacy media" for, he alleged, pushing "to censor more and more."
He also said the systems the company had created to moderate its platforms were making too many mistakes, adding that it would continue to aggressively moderate content related to drugs, terrorism and child exploitation.
"We're going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies and restoring free expression on our platforms," Zuckerberg said in a video. "More specifically, here's what we're going to do. First, we're going to get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with community notes similar to X, starting in the U.S."
"We built a lot of complex systems to moderate content, but the problem with complex systems is they make mistakes," Zuckerberg said. "Even if they accidentally censor just 1% of posts, that's millions of people, and we've reached a point where it's just too many mistakes and too much censorship."
Meta’s initial fact-checking system, which was launched on Facebook in 2016, worked by running information on its platforms through third-party fact-checkers certified by the International Fact-Checking Network and the European Fact-Checking Standards Network. The program included more than 90 organizations that would fact-check posts in more than 60 languages. In the United States, they have included groups such as PolitiFact and Factcheck.org.
