Social media giant Meta scraps fact-checking for ‘community notes’

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

The move, revealed on Tuesday, comes as tech executives embrace incoming US President Donald Trump, whose right-wing supporters have long decried online content moderation as a tool of censorship.

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

Contributors there draft factual corrections for posts that only become apparent after being approved by other contributors with opposing viewpoints.

Joel Kaplan, the company’s COO Global Affairs Officer, stated that the previous fact-checking initiative, which was launched in 2016, sought to provide more reliable data on viral hoaxes. But, he added, that’s “not the way things played out”.

Over time, Kaplan said in a statement, “we ended up with too much content being fact checked so that people would accept legitimate political speech and debate.”

“Our system then added actual consequences to the distribution and intrusive labels. Too frequently, a program intended to educate turned into a censor’s tool.

Meta, which donated $1m to Trump’s inauguration fund last month, also announced it would remove restrictions on controversial political subjects, including immigration and gender identity.

“It’s not right that things can be said on TV or the floor of Congress, but not on our platforms”, Kaplan said, adding that the changes will take a few weeks to implement.

Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s CEO, stated in a separate video message that the company would switch its content editing team from liberal California to Texas with Republican influences.

In a video message, Zuckerberg stated, “I think that will help us build trust to do this work in areas where there is less concern about the bias of our teams.”

He added that the company will lower the bar for dismissing posts for alleged policy violations and reduce the company’s moderation policies.

“The reality is that this is a trade-off”, Zuckerberg said. It means we’ll catch less bad content, but it also means we’ll reduce the number of innocent users’ accounts and posts.

In the wake of the announcement, President-elect Trump praised Zuckerberg during a press 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 a reporter asked if the decision resulted from threats Trump had made to social media companies in the past, the president-elect offered a short response: “Probably”.

Palestinian rights supporters have long accused Meta of censoring their posts, despite the fact that COVID-19 and election interference dominate the discussion over social media content moderation in the US.

Human Rights Watch claimed in a report that Meta was “siling voices in support of Palestine and Palestinian human rights” in 2023.