CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that Meta will be working with President-elect Donald Trump.
Meta is ending its fact-checking program in the United States and replacing it with community notes, similar to the system used by Elon Musk-owned social media platform X, the company announced on Jan. 7.
After President-elect Donald Trump was elected in 2016, Meta started a fact-checking program. Third parties would tackle some topics, leading to posts being removed or flagged.
“It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression on Facebook and Instagram,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a video.
The fact-checkers “have become too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they created, especially in the U.S.,” Zuckerberg said.
Community notes are based on feedback from users. Notes that receive a certain number of votes across people with different ideologies are displayed under posts.
The notes “empower their community to decide when posts are potentially misleading and need more context, and people across a diverse range of perspectives decide what sort of context is helpful for other users to see,” Joel Kaplan, Meta’s chief global affairs officer, said in a Jan. 7 blog post.
Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp, is also simplifying its content policies by removing rules related to topics such as immigration and gender.
The rules “are just out of touch with mainstream discourse,” Zuckerberg said. “What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas. And it’s gone too far.”
He added later: “I want to make sure people can share their experiences and beliefs on our platform.”
While Meta will still act the same when it comes to severe violations for topics such as drugs, the company will only act against posts that are deemed low severity if people report the post. In the past, Meta used its systems to scan the platform for violations and took action against posts that violated its policies.
The change will result in fewer bad posts being taken down, but will also reduce accidental takedowns, Zuckerberg said, as mistakes have been made.
“Even if they accidentally censor just one percent of posts, that’s millions of people. And we’ve reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship,” Zuckerberg said.
