Meta, the company that owns Facebook and Instagram, announced on Tuesday that it is discontinuing its third-party fact-checking program and substituting it with user-written Community Notes, which are modeled after Elon Musk’s social media platform X.
Meta will discontinue its independent third-party fact-checking program in the U.S. due to the biases of the expert fact-checkers and the fact that too much content was fact verified, the business claimed it opted to terminate the program.
Rather, it will switch to a Community Notes approach that leverages user-generated fact-checking contributions.
In a blog post, Joel Kaplan, Chief Global Affairs Officer of Meta, stated, “We’ve seen this approach work on X – where they empower their community to decide when posts are potentially misleading and need more contexts.”
The company will work on improving the new system over the course of the year, and it will be phased in over the next few months, according to Kaplan.
Laptops 1000During the shift, Meta will replace warnings that are superimposed on content that users are compelled to click through with labels.
The social media platform also stated that it intends to permit “more speech” by removing some limitations on subjects that are commonly discussed, including gender and immigration, to concentrate on unlawful and “high severity violations,” such as narcotics, terrorism, and child sex exploitation.
Meta claimed that its strategy of creating intricate systems to control content on its platforms has “gone too far” and made “too many mistakes” by censoring excessive content.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted that political developments, including Donald Trump’s election triumph, are partially to blame for the changes.
In an online video, Zuckerberg stated, “The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech.”
Established to referee contentious decisions, Meta’s quasi-independent Oversight Board said it welcomed the changes and looked forward to collaborating with the company “to understand the changes in greater detail, ensuring its new approach can be as effective and speech-friendly as possible.”
