Meta Ditches Fact-Checking Program, Wants You to Join It With Social Media

The shaver is shut down its third-party monitoring software on Instagram and Facebook, the company said on Tuesday, and instead it will rely on Group Posts, a user-driven management system similar to that used by X. It is also removing restrictions on topics such as gender and immigration.

“It’s time to get back to our hometowns on Facebook and Instagram,” Zuckerberg said in a videoreferring to his 2019 Georgetown University speech promoting free speech.

Going back nearly a decade, including during the first Trump administration, Meta implemented a complex regulatory framework in response to social and political pressures. Zuckerberg said in the video that it didn’t always work as he wanted: “The problem with complex systems is that they make mistakes. Even if they accidentally look at just 1% of the text, that’s millions of people. There are a lot of mistakes and a lot of analysis.”

Citing it as a “cultural development” for the 2024 US elections, when Donald Trump won a second term as president, Zuckerberg said the company will prioritize speech by reducing policies, reducing errors and restoring free speech.

The changes come two weeks before Trump’s inauguration and as Meta faces continued criticism for using fake news; allegations of political bias; and criticizing the social impact of its platforms.

One of the big problems for social media companies over the past decade they have been making decisions about what is allowed on their platforms, and what to remove, including political and medical propaganda and hate speech. Critics have argued that what social networking sites, especially Facebook, Twitter (now X) and YouTube, have done is stifle speech. Others, however, have argued that additional oversight has become more important in the fight against the deadly epidemic and the proliferation of fake news.

Introducing Social Policy

In the US, Meta will now launch Community Notes, where users write and edit notes to provide content that can be misleading. In a blog post, Joel Kaplan, Meta’s global head, highlighted the system’s security issues, noting that it requires cooperation from people with different perspectives to help prevent discrimination. Users can register as supporters starting today.

Meta is also planning to change the way it implements policies to reduce censorship errors. Serious crimes, such as those related to terrorism and child abuse, will still rely on automation, but less complexity is required for people to report before action is taken.

Kaplan echoed Zuckerberg’s words, emphasizing a “policy-centric approach” that allows users to control their views.

“Meta platforms are built to be a place where people can freely express themselves,” he wrote. “This might be confusing. … But I’m speaking freely.”

In addition, Meta will change the way users view political and social content, and reduce its 2021 cutoff for such content. Kaplan called that approach “absurd.” Content in Followed Pages and people will now be ranked like any other post, based on their interests and opinions.

Kaplan said the fact-checking program, which was launched in 2016 to combat disinformation, has turned into a tool that sometimes stifles legitimate political debate.

“Over time we’ve had a lot of things that have been censored to make people understand that they’re rational and politically controversial,” he wrote. “Our system combined the actual results in the form of confusing labels and reduced the distribution. A program that aims to inform in many cases became an analytical tool.”

Zuckerberg said that it will take time to get the new system right, and that there is a lot of illegal content to figure out how to remove it. “These are complex systems; they are not perfect,” he said.