Meta Platforms has announced that it is replacing third-party fact checking on Facebook, Instagram and Threads with a user-reported community notes program, similar to the one used by Elon Musk’s X. Community notes allows users to collaboratively add context or information to potentially misleading posts.
The new changes will first roll out in the US over the next two months.
“We have reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship. It's time to go back to our roots around free expression,” said founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a video post.
Meta’s new chief global affairs head Joe Kaplan also reiterated that the current content moderation team is making “too many mistakes”, restricting “legitimate political debate” and “frustrating” the social media users.
Kaplan, a prominent Republican and former White House deputy chief of staff, has replaced former British deputy prime minister Nick Clegg who served as Meta’s head of global policy for six years until last month.
Further, Kaplan said that Meta will modify its content moderation policies to focus more on “high-severity violations” such as terrorism, child sexual exploitation, scams, fraud, and drugs.
Additionally, the social media giant will no longer demote fact-checked content, replace full-screen warning with less disruptive labels, lift restrictions on certain topics that are widely discussed, and give users more control over the amount of political content they want to see in their feeds.
Meta started using independent fact-checking organizations in 2016 after facing political backlash for not taking adequate measures to curb the spread of fake news during the 2016 US elections. Over the years, this fact checking program has been criticized for being overly strict, while content moderators have been accused of being biased against certain political groups, especially Republicans in the US.
In 2021, Facebook along with Twitter and YouTube banned president-elect Donald Trump from their platforms after the attack on the US Capitol in January 2021.
In May 2020, during his first term Trump signed an executive order to scrap certain safeguards that protected social media companies from liability for content posted on their platform. The order gave federal agencies the power to take action against social media platforms that were found to be censoring free speech.
Last August, Trump in his latest book “Save America” accused Zuckerberg of plotting against him in the 2020 US elections. He also warned that the founder would “spend the rest of his life in prison” if he did it again.
Trump ally Elon Musk, who also claims to be a staunch advocate of free speech,
acquired Twitter in October 2022, changed its name to X, and reinstated accounts of several political figures including Trump.
X first implemented the Community Notes program in April 2024 to combat misinformation and provide users with more context on potentially misleading posts.
However, the program is not always reliable and can been misused by organized political groups. Many critics have found that community notes on X can be easily manipulated to discredit any post, regardless of their accuracy, by mass-rating it to effectively silence dissenting or minority voices.
Meta has assured users that it wants to be more transparent on how different viewpoints inform the community notes displayed on their social networks and is working on finding a way to share this information with users.
Image credit: Meta Platforms