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Facebook owner Meta is ending its third-party fact-checking programme and will instead rely on its users to flag misinformation, as the social media giant prepares for Donald Trump’s return as president.
The $1.59tn company on Tuesday said it would “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” and “take a more personalised approach to political content”.
“It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression on Facebook and Instagram,” Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive and co-founder, said in a video post.
President-elect Trump was sharply critical of Zuckerberg during last year’s US presidential election campaign, suggesting that if Meta interfered in the 2024 vote he would “spend the rest of his life in prison”.
But the Facebook founder has sought to rebuild relations with Trump following his November victory, including visiting him at his Florida residence at Mar-a-Lago.
On Monday, Meta moved to make further inroads with the incoming US presidential administration by appointing UFC founder and prominent Donald Trump supporter Dana White to its board of directors.
Zuckerberg said that the complexity of its content moderation system, which was expanded in December 2016 following Trump’s first election win, had introduced “too many mistakes and too much censorship”.
Starting in the US, Meta will move to a so-called “community notes” model, similar to the one employed by Elon Musk’s X, which allows users to add context to controversial or misleading posts. Meta itself will not write community notes.
Zuckerberg added that Meta would also change its systems to “dramatically reduce” the amount of content that its automated filters remove from its platforms. That includes lifting restrictions on topics such as immigration and gender.
He acknowledged that the changes would mean Meta “is going to catch less bad stuff”, but argued the trade-off was worthwhile to reduce the number of “innocent people’s” posts that were taken down.
The changes bring Zuckerberg into closer alignment with Musk, who slashed content moderation after buying the social media platform, then called Twitter, in 2022.
“Just like they do on X, Community Notes will require agreement between people with a range of perspectives to help prevent biased ratings,” Meta said in a blog post.
Joel Kaplan, a prominent Republican who Meta announced last week was taking over from Sir Nick Clegg as its president of global affairs, told Fox News on Tuesday that its third-party fact checkers had been “too biased”.
In a reference to Trump’s return to the White House on January 20, Kaplan added: “We’ve got a real opportunity now, we’ve got a new administration and a new president coming in who are big defenders of free expression and that makes a difference.”