Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a series of major changes to the company’s moderation policies and practices Tuesday, citing a shifting political and social landscape and a desire to embrace free speech.
Zuckerberg said that Meta will end its fact-checking program with trusted partners and replace it with a community-driven system similar to X’s Community Notes.
The company is also making changes to its content moderation policies around political topics and undoing changes that reduced the amount of political content in user feeds, Zuckerberg said.
The changes will affect Facebook and Instagram, two of the largest social media platforms in the world, each boasting billions of users, as well as Threads.
“We’re going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies and restoring free expression on our platforms,” Zuckerberg said in a video. “More specifically, here’s what we’re going to do. First, we’re going to get rid of fact checkers and replace them with community notes similar to X, starting in the U.S.”
Zuckerberg pointed to the election as a major influence on the company’s decision and criticized “governments and legacy media” for allegedly pushing “to censor more and more.”
“The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards, once again, prioritizing speech,” he said.
“So we’re gonna get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies and restoring free expression on our platforms.”
He also said the systems the company had created to moderate its platforms were making too many mistakes, adding that the company would continue to aggressively moderate content related to drugs, terrorism and child exploitation.
“We built a lot of complex systems to moderate content, but the problem with complex systems is they make mistakes,” Zuckerberg said. “Even if they accidentally censor just 1% of posts, that’s millions of people, and we’ve reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship.”…
The changes come as Meta and social media companies broadly have in recent years reversed course on content moderation due in part to the politicization of moderation decisions and programs. Republicans have long criticized Meta’s fact-checking system and fact-checking in general as unfair and favoring Democrats — a claim that is in dispute….
Zuckerberg’s announcement comes as CEOs and business leaders across sectors are currying favor with the incoming administration of President-elect Donald Trump. Meta, along with other tech companies, donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund, and ahead of the election, Zuckerberg praised Trump in an interview with Bloomberg Television without offering an outright endorsement. Ahead of Trump’s inauguration, Meta has reportedly appointed Republican Joel Kaplan to lead its policy team, and on Monday, the company announced that UFC’s Dana White, a long-time supporter of Trump, would join its board.
Kaplan appeared on Fox News on Tuesday morning as part of the rollout of the company’s announcement. No other Meta executive appeared on any news channel.