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Meta announced Tuesday that it is dropping its third-party fact-checking programs on Facebook, Instagram and Threads and replacing its army of paid moderators with a Community Notes model that mimics X’s. much-maligned volunteer programwhich allows users to publicly report content they believe to be incorrect or misleading.
In a blog post announcing the news, Meta’s new head of global business, Joel Kaplan, said the decision was made to allow more topics to be discussed openly on the company’s platforms. The change will first impact the moderation of the company in the United States.
“We will allow more speech by lifting restrictions on certain topics that are part of mainstream speech and focusing our enforcement on illegal and high-severity violations,” Kaplan said, although he did not detail what topics these new rules would cover. .
In a video accompanying the blog post, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the new policies will see more political content return to people’s feeds, as well as posts about other issues that have fueled the war. culture in the United States in recent years.
“We’re simplifying our content policies and getting rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse,” Zuckerberg said.
Meta has significantly delayed the fact-checking and release of the content moderation policies it had put in place after the revelations in 2016 about the influence operations carried out on its platforms, which were designed to influence the elections and in some cases promote violence and even genocide.
Before last year’s elections in the world, Meta was criticized for taking a hands-off approach to content moderation related to those votes.
I echo the comments that Mark Zuckerberg made last yearKaplan said Meta’s content moderation policies were put in place not to protect users, but “in part in response to societal and political pressure to moderate content.”
Kaplan also criticized fact-checking experts for their “biases and perspectives” that led to excessive moderation: “Over time we ended up with too much verified content that people understand is legitimate political speech and debate” , Kaplan wrote.
However WIRED reported last year that dangerous content such as medical misinformation he flourished on the platform as groups like it anti-government militias used Facebook to recruit new members.
Meanwhile, Zuckerberg blamed the “legacy media” for forcing Facebook to implement content moderation policies in the wake of the 2016 election. “After Trump was first elected in 2016, the legacy media have wrote non-stop about how disinformation was a threat to democracy,” Zuckerberg said. “We tried, in good faith, to address these concerns without becoming arbiters of the truth, but the fact-checkers were too political and destroyed more trust than they created,”
In an attempt to remove prejudice, Zuckerberg said that Meta’s internal security and trust team moved from California to Texas, which is also now the headquarters of X. “As we work to promote free expression, I think it will help us build trust to do this work in places where there is less concern about harming our teams,” Zuckerberg said.
