Meta ends its fact-checking program in favor of a “community ratings” system similar to X

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a series of major changes to the company’s moderation policies and practices on Tuesday, citing a changing political and social landscape and a desire to embrace free speech.

Zuckerberg said Meta would end its fact-checking program with trusted partners and replace it with a community system similar to X’s Community Notes.

The company is also making changes to its content moderation policies around political topics and rolling back changes that reduced the amount of political content in users’ feeds, Zuckerberg said.

The changes will affect Facebook and Instagram, two of the world’s largest social media platforms, each with billions of users, as well as Threads.

“We’re going to return to our roots and focus on reducing errors, simplifying our policies, and restoring free speech on our platforms,” Zuckerberg said in a video. “Specifically, here’s what we’re going to do. First, we’re going to get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with community ratings similar to X, starting with the United States.”

Zuckerberg pointed out that the election had a major influence on the company’s decision and criticized “governments and mainstream media” for allegedly pushing “to censor more and more.”

“The recent election also appears to be a cultural shift toward a new emphasis on speech,” he said.

“So we’re going to go back to our roots and focus on reducing errors, simplifying our policies, and restoring free speech on our platforms.”

He also said the systems the company created to moderate its platforms had too many errors, adding that the company would continue to aggressively moderate content related to drugs, terrorism and child exploitation .

“We’ve built a lot of complex systems to moderate content, but the problem with complex systems is that they make mistakes,” Zuckerberg said. “Even if they accidentally censor just 1% of posts, that’s millions of people, and we’ve reached a point where there are just too many errors and too much censorship.”

Beyond ending the facet verification program, Zuckerberg said the company would eliminate some content policies around hot-button issues, including immigration and gender, and refocus the company’s automated moderation systems on what he called “high severity violations” and would rely on users. report other violations.

Facebook will also move its trust, safety and content moderation team from California to Texas.

“We will also adjust our content filters to require much greater trust before removing content,” he said. “The reality is that it’s a trade-off. It means we’ll detect fewer bad things, but we’ll also reduce the number of innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally delete.”

These changes come as Meta and social media companies have broadly reversed their policies in recent years on content moderation, in part due to the politicization of moderation decisions and programs. Republicans have long criticized Meta’s fact-checking system and fact-checking in general as unfair and favoring Democrats — a claim that is disputed.

The Community System Notes of X, which the CEO Elon Musk used to replace the previous efforts of the company in terms of disinformation, was greeted by the Conservatives and allowed a mixture of verification of the facts, to train and to train and other community behaviors.

Zuckerberg’s announcement comes as CEOs and business leaders across industries curry favor with the new administration of President-elect Donald Trump. Meta, along with other tech companies, donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund, and before the election, Zuckerberg praised Trump in an interview with Bloomberg Television without giving his outright support. Ahead of Trump’s inauguration, Meta reportedly named Republican Joel Kaplan to lead its political team, and on Monday the company announced that UFC’s Dana White, a longtime Trump supporter, would join its board of directors.

Kaplan appeared on Fox News Tuesday morning as part of the company’s announcement rollout. No other Meta leaders have appeared on any news channel.

Meta’s initial fact-checking system, launched on Facebook in 2016, worked by serving information across its platforms through third-party fact-checkers certified by the International Fact-Checking Network and the European Fact-Checking Standards Network. The program included more than 90 organizations that would verify posts in more than 60 languages. In the United States, they include groups such as PolitiFact and Factcheck.org.

In a press release, Meta wrote that it was able to identify posts that might promote misinformation based on how people reacted to certain pieces of content and how quickly the posts would spread. Independent fact-checkers would also work to identify posts containing possible misinformation themselves. Posts believed to contain misinformation would then be displayed further down in the feeds awaiting review.

Independent fact-checkers would then work to verify the accuracy of the content that had been reported and give it a “content rating”, labeling the content as “false”, “edited”, “partly false”, “context missing”, “Satire” or “True” and adding reviews to posts.

These fact-checking measures applied to all posts on Facebook and expanded to include Instagram in 2019 and Threads last year. Fact-checkers were able to review content including “ads, articles, photos, videos, Reels, audio and text posts.”

Under the system, Meta noted, fact-checkers did not have the ability to remove content, and content would be removed if it violated the company’s community standards, which was discerned by Meta itself. even.

In addition to changes to content moderation, Zuckerberg also said Tuesday that the company would change its powerful recommendation system that decides what to show users. Meta has restricted political content for years, citing user complaints and following discussions about how social media can affect users’ beliefs.

“We’re bringing back the civic content,” he said. “For a while, the community asked to see less politics because it stressed people out, so we stopped recommending these posts. But we feel like we’re in a new era now, and we’re starting to receive comments that people want to review this content So we will gradually begin to reintegrate it on Facebook, Instagram and Threads, while working to keep the communities friendly and positive.

Finally, Zuckerberg said Meta would work with the new Trump administration to promote free speech around the world, although he did not detail any measures to achieve this goal.

“We will work with President Trump to push back against governments around the world that are going after American businesses and pushing for increased censorship,” he said, adding that various countries have cracked down on some online speech.

“The only way to counter this global trend is with the support of the US government, and that’s why it’s been so difficult over the last four years, when even the US government has pushed for censorship,” Zuckerberg added . “By attacking us and other American companies, it encouraged other governments to go even further.”

In recent years, the government’s interactions with social media companies have come under scrutiny from Republican politicians who have claimed censorship. After the 2016 election, Meta and other social media companies stepped up their moderation efforts and met regularly with representatives of the FBI and other government organizations to prevent foreign interference. As Republicans began to inquire about the government’s interactions with social media platforms, those meetings became the subject of congressional investigations led by conservative leaders such as Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio.

In 2022, Zuckerberg defended the company’s interactions with agencies such as the FBI, calling it a “legitimate institution” in an interview with podcaster Joe Rogan.

Scrutiny has also focused on communications between the White House and social media companies, particularly around posts related to the Covid pandemic and vaccines. In August, Zuckerberg said the Biden White House had pressured Meta to take action against certain Covid-related posts and that it was a mistake to do so.

In June, the Supreme Court rejected arguments that the government illegally forced social media companies to remove content.

Yet the problem remained politically salient, amplified by Musk’s purchase of X (then Twitter) and his moves to radically change the platform’s moderation practices. Zuckerberg has previously praised Musk’s handling of X, even though he has occasionally engaged in a feud that has included talk of a possible cage fight.