Mark Zuckerberg’s social media giant, Meta, has announced plans to end its third-party fact-checking program to allow users to comment freely across its platforms, which include Facebook, Instagram, and Threads.
In place of content moderation, the company said it will now move to a Community Note program, the same approach adopted and now popular with Elon Musk’s X.
Meta’s Chief Global Affairs Officer, Joel Kaplan, announced this on Tuesday via a blog post, noting that the Community Note program would start in the U.S.
Too much fact-checking
Kaplan said the intention of the fact-checking program was to have independent experts give people more information about the things they see online, particularly viral hoaxes, so they were able to judge for themselves what they saw and read.
He, however, noted that that has not played out the way it was intended as it has led to censorship and “too much content” being fact-checked.
“Over time we ended up with too much content being fact-checked that people would understand to be legitimate political speech and debate.
“Our system then attached real consequences in the form of intrusive labels and reduced distribution. A program intended to inform too often became a tool to censor,” he said.
The shift to Community Note
Highlighting the success Community Note has had on a platform like X, formerly Twitter, Kaplan said:
“We are now changing this approach. We will end the current third-party fact-checking program in the United States and instead begin moving to a Community Notes program.
“We’ve seen this approach work on X – where they empower their community to decide when posts are potentially misleading and need more context, and people across a diverse range of perspectives decide what sort of context is helpful for other users to see.
“We think this could be a better way of achieving our original intention of providing people with information about what they’re seeing – and one that’s less prone to bias.”
- Kaplan added that once the program is up and running, Meta won’t write Community Notes or decide which ones show up. They are written and rated by contributing users.
- Just like they do on X, Community Notes will require agreement between people with a range of perspectives to help prevent biased ratings.
- He said Meta intends to be transparent about how different viewpoints inform the Notes displayed in its apps, and working on the right way to share this information.
What you should know
U.S. President-elect Donald Trump, was one of many top personalities affected by Meta’s stringent content moderation as he was temporarily banned from Facebook in the wake of the Jan. 6, 2021, US Capitol riot.
- Trump had described the Meta platform as “an enemy of the people” and accused the tech company of censoring conservative voices. Trump’s account was, however, reinstated in 2023.
- In December 2024, Meta said it removed millions of pieces of content every day, but it admitted that while those actions accounted for less than 1% of content produced every day, “one to two out of every 10 of these actions may have been mistakes.”
