Meta Eliminates Third-Party Fact-Checking and Moves to “Community Notes”

Meta on Tuesday announced it will eliminate its third-party fact-checking program to “restore free expression” and move to a “Community Notes” model similar to the system that exists on Elon Muskthe X platform.

The company said community notes will be written and moderated by contributing users to provide more context for posts on its platforms, and the feature will roll out in the US over the next few months. The announcement marks Metta’s latest attempt to mend relations with the Republican president-elect Donald Trump before he takes office.

“We’ve reached a point where there are too many mistakes and too much censorship,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Tuesday in a video announcement. “The recent election also marks a cultural tipping point toward re-prioritizing expression, so we’re going to go back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies, and restoring free speech on our platforms.”

Zuckerberg said third-party fact-checkers were “too politically biased” and “destroyed more trust than they built, especially in the US.”

Meta said it will simplify its content policies, removing restrictions on topics such as immigration and gender, and implementing a new approach to policy enforcement that will focus on illegal and serious violations. The company is moving its trust and safety and content moderation teams from California, a historically Democratic state, to Texas, a historically Republican state.

“We will work with President Trump to push back against governments around the world that are targeting American companies and pushing for more censorship,” Zuckerberg said.

Federal Trade Commission Chairwoman Lina Hahn addressed Meta’s statement in an interview Tuesday on CNBC “Squawk Box“, saying, “We need to have an economy where the decisions of one company or one executive don’t have an extraordinary impact on speech on the Internet.”

Joel Kaplan, Meta’s head of global policy, appeared on Fox News’ “Fox and Friends” on Tuesday and said Meta believes the Community Notes system on Musk’s X platform is working “very well.” Musk, who has actively defended Trump online and donated millions of dollars to his campaign, has maintained close contact with the president-elect since the election.

Last week, Meta said that Kaplan will become the campaign’s top policymaker, succeeding Nick Clegg, who was British Deputy Prime Minister and leader of Britain’s centrist Liberal Democrat party.

Kaplan, who has held several policy positions at Meta since joining the company in 2011 when it was still Facebook, is well known in the Republican Party. He was the White House Deputy Chief of Staff under former President George W. Bush, and also once worked as a secretary to a former Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia.

In December, Kaplan told about it on Facebook post that he joined Vice President-elect J. D. Vance and Trump during their recent visit on the New York Stock Exchange.

“We want to make it so that if you can say it on television, you say it on the floor of Congress, you should definitely be able to say it on Facebook and Instagram without fear of censorship,” Kaplan said. Tuesday.

The Meta watchdog, which conducts an independent review of the company’s content moderation, on Tuesday praised the company’s changes.

“The supervisory board welcomes the news that Meta will revise its approach to fact-checking in order to find a scalable solution to increase trust, free speech and user voices on its platforms,” ​​the board said in a statement to CNBC, adding that “in particular, in In the United States, rightly or wrongly, Meta’s previous approach was perceived by many users as politically biased.”

Prominent Republican lawmakers have previously criticized Meta and other tech companies for allegedly censoring conservative voices on their respective platforms. For example, Chief Justice Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, garden sub-shop Zuckerberg and other tech executives in 2023 as part of an investigation to “understand how and to what extent the executive branch coerced and colluded with companies and other intermediaries to censor speech.”

Zuckerberg has had a rocky relationship with Trump over the years, with the newly elected president calling Facebook “the enemy of the people” in March. an interview from CNBC. The goal was covered by a two-year suspension on Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts in 2021, shortly after the campaign determined that the former president’s actions following the Jan. 6 uprising in Washington, D.C., could potentially incite more violence.

In 2023, Trump was able to regain access to his Facebook and Instagram accounts, but he also faced some restrictions and potential fines if he violated the company’s community guidelines. The goal after all lifted Trump’s restrictions on the accounts in July in the run-up to the 2024 US presidential election.

In recent months, the company has taken additional steps to appease the new administration. Meta announced Monday that Dana White, CEO of the Ultimate Fighting Championship and a longtime friend of Trump, is joining its board.

After Trump won the presidential election in November, Zuckerberg joined a number of other big tech executives who visited president-elect at Mar-a-Lago Resort in Palm Beach, Florida, and in December, Meta confirmed a $1 million donation to Trump’s inaugural fund.