On Jan. 7, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that his social media company — responsible for platforms including Facebook and Instagram — will be shelving its fact-checking system and will be replacing it with a “community notes” system similar to what one can find on Elon Musk’s X.
According to Zuckerberg the system will be rolled out in the United States first, followed by other countries later.
“In the coming months, we will end the current third party fact checking program in the United States and begin moving to a community-based program called Community Notes,” a statement on Meta’s Transparency Center reads.
“We are beginning with rolling out Community Notes in the US, and will continue to improve it over the course of the year before expansion to other countries,” it adds.
Zuckerberg says Doanld Trump’s recent election to the presidency is the driving factor behind his decision, calling it a “cultural tipping point towards, once again, prioritizing speech.”
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He also admitted what many have believed for some time, that Meta’s fact-checking system was politically biased.
In a video address announcing the changes Zuckerberg said, “Starting in the U.S. after Trump first got elected in 2016, the legacy media wrote non-stop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy… We tried, in good faith, to address those concerns without becoming the arbiters of truth, but the fact checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created, especially in the U.S.”
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‘We’ve seen this approach work on X’
Community Notes on X is a feature that enables users to collaboratively add context to potentially misleading posts through crowdsourced fact-checking. By providing balanced and credible information the tool aims to foster transparency and combat misinformation on the platform.
Joel Kaplan, Meta’s chief global affairs officer, believes the system is working well on X saying in a statement, “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,” he added.
Facebook and Instagram users can expect to see the changes in their timelines pop up over the next few months, and the system will continue to be refined over the remainder of the year.
“We will allow more speech by lifting restrictions on some topics that are part of mainstream discourse and focusing our enforcement on illegal and high-severity violations,” Kaplan wrote.
“High-severity violations” will include posts related to drugs, terrorism, child exploitation, and frauds and scams.
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‘Allowing More Speech’
Kaplan said that Meta’s current content moderation scheme, which was first launched in 2016, has grown too complex and has become increasingly difficult to enforce fairly, resulting in the company “over-enforcing” their rules.
He said legitimate political debate has been censored too much on his platforms adding that in December of last year millions of posts were removed.
Kaplan said that “two out of every 10 of these actions may have been mistakes,” meaning the content may not have actually violated Meta policies.
Describing Meta’s current moderation system as having suffered from “mission creep” Kaplan admitted the rules are “too restrictive and too prone to over-enforcement.”
He said that restrictions on topics like immigration, gender identity and gender will be removed. “It’s not right that things can be said on TV or the floor of Congress, but not on our platforms,” he said.
How the company enforces their policies will be changing as well.
“We’re also going to change how we enforce our policies to reduce the kind of mistakes that account for the vast majority of the censorship on our platforms,” he wrote, adding that, “Up until now, we have been using automated systems to scan for all policy violations, but this has resulted in too many mistakes and too much content being censored that shouldn’t have been.”
Kaplan said that the changes are consistent with messaging Zuckerberg has made in the past and that they are “an attempt to return to the commitment to free expression that Mark Zuckerberg set out in his Georgetown speech.”
“That means being vigilant about the impact our policies and systems are having on people’s ability to make their voices heard, and having the humility to change our approach when we know we’re getting things wrong.” he said.
