Meta is abandoning its fact-checking program, and wants you to participate in community feedback

Meta is Close third party validation program The company said Tuesday that it will open on Instagram and Facebook, and will instead rely on Community Notes, a user-driven moderation system similar to the one used by X. It also removes restrictions on topics like gender and immigration.

“It’s time to go back to our roots of free expression on Facebook and Instagram.” Zuckerberg said in a video:referring to his speech he gave at Georgetown University in 2019 in which he called for freedom of expression.

Going back nearly a decade, including during the first Trump administration, Meta implemented complex content moderation systems in response to societal and political pressures. Zuckerberg said in the video that it doesn’t always go as desired: “The problem with complex systems is that they make mistakes. Even if they accidentally censor just 1% of posts, that means millions of people. We’ve reached a point where there’s a lot of “Mistakes and a lot of oversight.”

Pointing to the 2024 US election, in which Donald Trump was elected to a second term as president, as a “cultural turning point,” Zuckerberg said the company would prioritize expression by simplifying policies, reducing errors and restoring freedom of expression.

These changes come two weeks before Trump’s inauguration, and as Meta faces ongoing criticism over its handling of misinformation, allegations of political bias and the broader societal impact of its platforms.

One of The biggest challenges facing social media companies Over the past decade, they have been deciding what content is allowed on their platforms, and what should be removed, including political and medical misinformation and hate speech. Critics have long charged that what social media networks, especially Facebook, Twitter (now X) and YouTube, are doing is censoring speech.

Provide community feedback

In the US, Meta will now implement community feedback, where users write and rate feedback to provide context for potentially misleading posts. Kaplan highlighted the system’s safeguards, noting that it requires the consent of people with diverse viewpoints to help prevent bias. Users can register as contributors starting today.

Meta also plans to modify how policies are implemented to reduce oversight errors. Serious abuses, such as terrorism and child exploitation, will still rely on automation, but less serious issues will require human reporting before action can be taken.

In a blog post, Joel Kaplan, Meta’s chief global affairs officer, echoed Zuckerberg, emphasizing a “more personalized approach to political content” that lets users control how much they see.

“Meta platforms are designed to be places where people can express themselves freely,” he wrote. “It can be messy…but that’s freedom of expression.”

Additionally, Meta will personalize how users see political and civic content, reversing the 2021 reduction in such posts. Kaplan called this approach “crude.” Content from Pages and people you follow will now be ranked like any other post, based on likes and views.

The fact-checking program, launched in 2016 to combat misinformation, has evolved into a tool that sometimes stifles legitimate political debate, Kaplan said.

“Over time, we end up verifying too much content that people might understand as legitimate political speech and debate,” he wrote. “Our system then inflicted real consequences in the form of intrusive labels and reduced distribution. Software intended to inform often became a tool of censorship.”

Zuckerberg said it will take time to properly implement the new approach, and that there is still a significant amount of illegal material to figure out how best to remove it. “These are complex systems, and they will never be perfect,” he added.