Social media giant Meta on Tuesday announced a series of changes to its content moderation policies, including the elimination of its fact-checking program, in what CEO Mark Zuckerberg said was an effort to embrace free speech.
“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 posted Tuesday morning.
“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.”
The changes mark a major move for the parent company of Instagram and Facebook and follows a series of other changes the company has made in recent weeks as President-elect Trump heads into his second term later this month.
Zuckerberg cited the recent election as a driving force in the company’s decision, slamming “governments and legacy media” as pushing the company to “censor more and more.”
“The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards, once again, prioritizing speech,” he said. “So we’re gonna get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies and restoring free expression on our platforms.”
The changes will be implemented on both Facebook and Instagram, along with Threads, which hosts billions of users every day.
Meta’s yearslong fact-checking program enlisted the help of third-party fact-checkers that moderated posts in more than 60 languages. The company stated the practice eventually became too restrictive of posts over the years.
The platform will move to a community-based program called “Community Notes,” akin to the system deployed by tech billionaire Elon Musk when he purchased the platform X, formerly known as Twitter, in 2021.
Meta platforms will now rely on users to send in notes or corrections to posts that are potentially misleading or need more context.
Joel Kaplan, Meta’s newly named global policy chief, said the platform saw this approach “work on X,” and emphasized that the social media network gives users the power to decide the context other users should be seeing.