Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a series of major changes to the company’s moderation policies and practices Tuesday, citing a shifting political and social landscape and a desire to embrace free speech.
Zuckerberg announced that Meta will discontinue its fact-checking program with trusted partners and will instead implement a community-driven system akin to X’s Community Notes. He stated that the company is revising its content moderation policies concerning political topics and reversing previous adjustments that limited the visibility of political content in user feeds.
The upcoming changes will impact Facebook and Instagram, two of the biggest social media platforms globally, each with billions of users, along with Threads. Zuckerberg also said Meta sites, including Facebook and Instagram, would “simplify” their content policies “and get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse.”
“We’re going to get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with community notes similar to X (formerly Twitter), starting in the US,” Meta Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a post on social media.
Meta’s announcement repeated multiple complaints raised by Republicans and X-owner Elon Musk regarding fact-checking initiatives that many on the conservative side perceive as a form of censorship. The change occurred as Zuckerberg has been working to mend ties with US President-elect Donald Trump, which includes contributing one million dollars to his inauguration fund.
In recent years, Trump has taken a strong stance against Meta and Zuckerberg, alleging that the company backs liberal policies and exhibits bias towards conservatives. The Republican was removed from Facebook after the January 6, 2021, assault on the US Capitol, but the platform reinstated his account in early 2023. Zuckerberg also dined with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort in November, as he looked to repair the company’s relationship with the incoming US leader following the presidential election.
Recently, Meta made a notable move by appointing Republican veteran Joel Kaplan to lead public affairs, succeeding Nick Clegg, who previously served as a British deputy prime minister. “Too much harmless content gets censored, too many people find themselves wrongly locked up in ‘Facebook jail,’” Kaplan said in a statement, insisting that its current approach to content moderation has “gone too far.”
Additionally, Meta will reverse its 2021 policy of reducing political content, offering users more control over what they see on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. The changes come as Meta ends its US fact-checking program, which had previously involved partnerships with 80 organizations, including AFP, across its platforms.
