Meta Platforms Inc. CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Tuesday pulled the plug on the company’s fact-checking program and replaced it with a community-driven system similar to that of Elon Musk’s X.
“We’re going to get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with community notes similar to X, starting in the U.S.,” Zuckerberg said in a video explaining the change that will impact nearly 4 billion users of Facebook, Instagram and Threads. He cited the 2024 U.S. presidential election for the decision, calling it a “cultural tipping point towards, once again, prioritizing speech.”
What Meta had been using to moderate its platforms made too many mistakes, Zuckerberg added.
Meta’s new Community Notes system, which will be rolled out and refined over the next several months, will no longer demote content that users have fact-checked and will include “a much less obtrusive label” pointing people to additional information, said Joel Kaplan, the company’s new chief global affairs officer. Meta will continue to moderate content related to drugs, terrorism, child exploitation and scams.
“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,” Kaplan wrote in a statement on the Meta site. “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, a longtime Republican lobbyist with close ties to President-elect Donald Trump’s incoming administration, recently replaced Nick Clegg, a former deputy prime minister of Britain who handled policy and regulatory issues globally for Meta since 2018.
Damian Rollison, director of market insights at SOCI, believes unfettered content on Facebook’s properties will inevitably lead to a spike in political speech and posts on controversial topics. And, as with X, where ad revenues plunged by half, the change may “make the [Facebook] platform less attractive to advertisers.”
“It may also cement a trend,” he said, “whereby Facebook is becoming the social network for older, more conservative users and ceding Gen Z to TikTok, with Instagram occupying a middle ground between them.”
Nonetheless, a new community notes approach is likely to appease Trump, who has claimed Meta’s fact-checking approach silenced conservative voices. Relations between the company and candidate significantly soured when Facebook banned him following the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol after determining Trump’s posts on the social media platform stoked violence that day.
“Tech-lash has brought everyone to where we are. Tech for a long time avoided political tumult. Balancing the removal of illegal or vile materials with allowing as much speech as possible on platforms of this size is difficult — and will likely never be perfect,” Jessica Melugin, director of the Center for Technology and Innovation at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, said in an interview. “But the timing of this shift suggests that government pressure, or ‘jawboning,’ was a major factor in many of the content moderation decisions that have frustrated the political right. Time will tell if these changes strike the right balance for users and advertisers. In the meantime, government should restrict its involvement to only criminal matters.”
The elimination of Meta’s fact-checking program announcement came a day after the company said Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO Dana White, a close ally of Trump, will join its board.
The fact-checking program debuted in 2016 in an effort to curb misinformation amid criticism over Facebook’s role in spreading false claims during that U.S. presidential election. By 2023, Meta said the initiative had “expanded to include nearly 100 organizations working in more than 60 languages globally.”
