In a statement released early Tuesday morning, Zuckerberg said “We’re going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies and restoring free expression on our platforms. More specifically, we’re going to get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with Community Notes similar to X, starting in the U.S.”
Starting in the U.S., Meta will end its fact-checking program with independent third parties. The company said it decided to end the program because expert fact checkers had their own biases and too much content ended up being fact checked.
Instead, it will pivot to a Community Notes model that uses crowdsourced fact-checking contributions from users.
“We’ve seen this approach work on X – where they empower their community to decide when posts are potentially misleading and need more context,” Meta's Chief Global Affairs Officer Joel Kaplan said in a blog post.
Kaplan said the new system will be phased in over the next couple of months, and the company will work on improving it over the year. As part of the transition, Meta will use labels to replace warnings overlaid on posts that it forces users to click through.
The Associated Press had participated in Meta’s fact-checking program previously but ended its participation a year ago.
The social media company also said it plans to allow “more speech” by lifting some restrictions on some topics that are part of mainstream discussion such as immigration and gender in order to focus on illegal and “high severity violations" like terrorism, child sexual exploitation and drugs.
Meta said that its approach of building complex systems to manage content on its platforms has "gone too far" and has made “too many mistakes” by censoring too much content.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged that the changes are in part sparked by political events including Donald Trump's presidential election victory.
“The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech,” Zuckerberg said in an online video.
The news comes as Meta has appointed three new members to its board of directors, including Dana White, the president and CEO of Ultimate Fighting Championship and a key figure in the orbit of incoming President Donald Trump.
The social media company is also adding auto tycoon John Elkann and tech investor Charlie Songhurst.
Tapping White to join the board could be seen as Zuckerberg's latest maneuver to improve ties with Trump, who was once banned from Facebook. After Trump won re-election in November, Zuckerberg dined at the president-elect's Mar-a-Lago club in Florida and Meta donated $1 million to Trump's inauguration fund. Other Big Tech companies such as Amazon have donated similar amounts.
