New York
CNN
—
Meta will be making major changes to its content moderation policy on Facebook and Instagram, getting rid of fact checkers and replacing them with user-generated “community notes,” similar to Elon Musk’s X, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Tuesday.
Meta’s newly appointed Chief of Global Affairs Joel Kaplan told Fox on Tuesday that Meta’s partnerships with third-party fact checkers were “well intentioned at the outset but there’s just been too much political bias in what they choose to fact check and how.”
The announcement comes amid a broader apparent ideological shift to the right within Meta’s top ranks, and as Zuckerberg seeks to improve his relationship with Trump before the president-elect takes office later this month. Just one day earlier, Meta announced Trump ally and UFC CEO Dana White would join its board, along with two other new directors. Meta has also said it will donate $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund, and that Zuckerberg wants to take an “active role” in tech policy discussions.
Kaplan, a prominent Republican who was elevated to the company’s top policy job last week, acknowledged that the Tuesday announcement is directly related to the changing administration.
He said that there’s “no question that there has been a change over the last four years. We saw a lot of societal and political pressure, all in the direction of more content, moderation more censorship, and we’ve got a real opportunity. Now we’ve got a new administration, and a new president coming in who are big defenders of free expression, and that makes a difference.”
The moderation changes mark a stunning reversal in how Meta handles false and misleading claims on its platforms.
In 2016, the company launched an independent fact-checking program, in the wake of claims that it had failed to stop foreign actors from leveraging its platforms to spread disinformation and sow discord among Americans. In the years since, it continued to grapple with the spread of controversial content on its platform, such as misinformation about elections, anti-vaccination stories, violence and hate speech.
The company had built up safety teams, introduced automated programs to filter out or reduce the visibility of false claims and instituted a sort of independent Supreme Court for tricky moderation decisions, known as the Oversight Board.
But now, in addition to ending its partnership with third-party fact checkers and instituting new, user-generated context labels called “community notes,” Meta also plans to adjust its automated systems that scan for policy violations, which it says have resulted in “too much content being censored that shouldn’t have been.”
Its systems will now be focused on checking only for illegal and “high-severity” violations such as terrorism, child sexual exploitation, drugs, fraud and scams. Other concerns will have to be reported by users before the company evaluates them.
This is a developing story and will be updated.