Social media giant Meta drops fact-checking for ‘community notes’ | News on social networks

Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, says that allowing fact-checkers to rate content has ‘become a tool for censorship’.

The the social media giant Meta, which owns Instagram and Facebook, has announced end its third-party fact-checking program in the United States, saying it would encourage “more speech” on its platform.

The move, revealed on Tuesday, comes as tech executives embrace the incoming US president Donald Trumpwhose right-wing supporters have long condemned the moderation of online content as a tool of censorship.

Instead of third-party fact-checkers, Meta said it will rely on “community notes,” similar to those used on social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter.

There, contributors draft factual corrections to posts that become visible only after they are confirmed by other contributors with different points of view.

Meta’s chief global affairs officer Joel Kaplan said the previous fact-checking initiative, launched in 2016, aimed for independent experts to provide more accurate information about viral scams. But, he added, “things didn’t turn out that way.”

“Over time, we ended up with too much content being vetted that people would perceive as legitimate political speech and debate,” Kaplan said in a statement.

“Our system then attributed real consequences in the form of intrusive labels and reduced distribution. A program intended to inform has too often become a tool for censorship.”

Target, which donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund last month, also announced it would remove restrictions on controversial political topics, including immigration and gender identity.

“It’s not right that things can be said on TV or in Congress but not on our platforms,” ​​Kaplan said, adding that it would take several weeks to implement the changes.

In a separate video message, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company would move its content moderation team from liberal California to Republican-leaning Texas.

“I think it’s going to help us build trust that we’re doing this work in places where there’s less concern about our teams being biased,” Zuckerberg said in a video message.

He added that the company will relax its moderation filters and raise the bar for removing posts for potential policy violations.

“The reality is this is a compromise,” Zuckerberg said. “This means we’ll catch less bad stuff, but we’ll also reduce the number of innocent people’s posts and accounts we accidentally remove.”

Following the announcement, President-elect Trump praised Zuckerberg during a news conference at his Mar-a-Lago resort.

“I think they’ve come a long way,” Trump said of Meta and Zuckerberg, adding, “The man was very impressive.”

When asked by a reporter if the decision was a result of Trump’s past threats on social media, the president-elect curtly replied, “Probably.”

Although much of the debate over social media content moderation in the US revolves around domestic issues, COVID 19 and interference in elections, supporters of Palestinian rights have long accused Meta of censoring their posts.

In 2023 Human Rights Watch published a report accusing Meta of “silencing voices of support for Palestine and Palestinian human rights”.

The group said it documented more than 1,000 removals of posts that were “unreasonably suppressed” on Meta platforms between October and November of that year.