Jan. 7 (UPI) — Meta on Tuesday announced it will end its third-party fact-checking program and shift to a user-generated “Community Notes” format.
The parent company of Facebook and Instagram said it will begin to “phase in” the Community Notes model in the United States in the next few months and will also undo efforts to reduce the amount of political content on its platforms while giving users the opportunity to tailor how much they see.
“It’s time to get back to our roots of free expression on Facebook and Instagram,” Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said.
He said “over-enforcement” on Meta’ss social media platforms is an issue and outlined steps company officials will take through the year to reverse a series of content moderation policies.
Zuckerberg, 40, did admit the tech giant built too many “complex systems” to monitor social media posts “partly in response to societal and political pressure to moderate content” which has frustrated users.
He added the focus going forward will be on transparency and “reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies and restoring free expression on our platforms.”
On Tuesday, Zuckerberg said Meta’s new policy approaches will “dramatically reduce censorship,” but also admitted there will be trade-offs as he pledged to work with the incoming Trump administration to combat what Zuckerberg believes to be a perceived sense of censorship in the U.S. and elsewhere.
“Fact-checkers have been too politically biased,” Zuckerberg said, pointing the use of a similar Community Notes feature on X as a model for Meta’s new approach.
Meta will also lift restrictions on a handful of topics that officials believe to be part of “mainstream discourse” so it can put a laser focus on “enforcement on illegal and high-severity violations,” and added it will take a “more personalized approach” to monitoring political content “so that people who want to see more of it in their feeds can.”
“Governments and legacy media have pushed to censor more and more,” he said. “A lot of this is clearly political,” but saying there is “legitimately bad stuff is out there.”
Meta has seen recent scrutiny over alleged suppression of pro-Palestinian and anti-Israeli content by the likes of the Human Rights Watch to news outlets like the BBC as Middle East wars rage on.
“The problem is that the filters make mistakes,” Zuckerberg said Tuesday.
Meta will get rid of a number of restrictions on topics like immigration, gender or gender identity that “are the subject of frequent political discourse and debate.” Officials said “it’s not right that things can be said on TV or the floor of Congress, but not on our platforms.”
Over the next weeks and months of the transition Meta will remove fact-checking controls, stop demoting fact-checked content and users will see “much less obtrusive” labels with improvements to be made over the course of this year.
“The reality is that this is a trade-off and means that we’re gonna catch less bad stuff but will also reduce the number of innocent people’s post and accounts that we accidentally take down,” said Meta’s CEO.
Meanwhile, the global tech company said it will move its trust and safety teams from California to Texas and other U.S. locations.
Zuckerberg stated it “feels like were in a new era now” but said “it will take time to get this right.”
Recently, Meta confirmed it donated $1 million to President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration fund.
Zuckerberg on Tuesday pledged to work with Trump to “push back on governments around the world that are going after American companies in pushing to censor more,” and he blasted the European community for what he claimed is an “ever increasing” number of laws “institutionalizing censorship” which, Zuckerberg claimed, makes it “difficult to build anything innovative” in Europe.
Meta stated it belief its new content moderations policy adjustments will return it “to the commitment to free expression.”
“That means being vigilant about the impact our policies and systems are having on people’s ability to make their voices heard, and having the humility to change our approach when we know we’re getting things wrong,” Meta officials wrote.
