Meta Says It's Ending Fact-Checking on Facebook and Instagram — Here's What That Means
The company announced the policy change on Tuesday, Jan. 7, less than two weeks before President-elect Donald Trump's inauguration
Onur Dogman/SOPA Images/LightRocket/Getty
Less than two weeks before the presidential inauguration of Donald Trump, Meta is moving away from its third-party fact-checking program — a cornerstone of its platforms since 2016 — in an effort to return to its “fundamental commitment to free expression,” the company said in a statement on Tuesday, Jan. 7.
Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and Threads, will switch to a "Community Notes" model, similar to Elon Musk’s X, which will “allow more speech by lifting restrictions on some topics that are part of the mainstream discourse,” the company said.
"We’re also going to change how we enforce our policies to reduce the kind of mistakes that account for the vast majority of the censorship on our platforms. Up until now, we have been using automated systems to scan for all policy violations, but this has resulted in too many mistakes and too much content being censored that shouldn’t have been."
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a video that the company is "going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies and restoring free expression on our platforms."
Zuckerberg added Meta will “take a more personalized approach to political content” but noted the new guidelines are a “trade-off.”
"It means that we’re going to catch less bad stuff, but we’ll also reduce the number of innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally take down,” he said.
Never miss a story — sign up for PEOPLE's free daily newsletter to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from celebrity news to compelling human interest stories.
In an appearance on Fox News' Fox & Friends on Tuesday, Meta’s new global policy chief Joel Kaplan explained that there was “too much political bias” in the current fact-checking program, according to the The New York Times.
The new guidelines will also affect Meta’s trust and safety content moderation teams, which are currently based in California and will be moved to Texas.
Related: Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary Says He’s Nearing Deal to Buy TikTok
“This will help remove the concern that biased employees are overly censoring content,” Zuckerberg wrote about the team’s impending move.
According to the company, "Community Notes" will be phased in over the next couple of months.
“As we make the transition, we will get rid of our fact-checking control, stop demoting fact checked content and, instead of overlaying full screen interstitial warnings you have to click through before you can even see the post, we will use a much less obtrusive label indicating that there is additional information for those who want to see it,” the company wrote.
Read the original article on People
