Mark Zuckerberg says Meta will replace third-party fact-checkers with community notes
BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/ Getty Images
- Meta is replacing third-party fact-checkers with community notes on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads.
- Mark Zuckerberg said it will use community notes, similar to X, and roll it out over the next few months.
- The Meta chief also said it will bring back more political content to users' timelines.
Meta is replacing third-party fact-checkers with a community notes model on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads.
Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, announced Tuesday that the company also plans to bring more political content back to the timelines of users and give them the option to customize how much of it they see.
The social media company plans to implement the sweeping content moderation changes over the next few months.
"First, we are going to get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with community notes, similar to X, starting in the US," Zuckerberg said in a video message posted on Meta's blog.
Meta's recently appointed chief global affairs officer, Joel Kaplan, said in the blog, "We've seen this approach work on X — where they empower their community to decide when posts are potentially misleading and need more context, and people across a diverse range of perspectives decide what sort of context is helpful for other users to see."
Kaplan pointed to the approach being "less prone to bias" as a reason for the decision.
The company will also "simplify" its content policies and "get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse," Kaplan said.
Meta has faced scrutiny in the past for its approach to content moderation. Last August, Zuckerberg sent a letter to Republican Rep. Jim Jordan, who chairs the House Judiciary Committee and has been a vocal critic of Zuckerberg. The Meta CEO said in his letter that the Biden administration repeatedly pressured the company to remove COVID-19-related content in 2021 and "expressed a lot of frustration" when the company did not agree.
X, formerly called Twitter, launched Community Notes in 2021, but the feature was seen on more posts on the platform in 2023. Under the program, users can sign up to add context to posts that might contain misinformation or misleading content. Other users can rate how helpful they find the note.
Similar to X, Meta will let users to contribute to the writing and rating of Community Notes, Kaplan said.
He also announced that Meta is moving its trust and safety teams, who help to moderate content, from California to Texas and other locations in the US.
The relocation of the trust and safety teams follows a move by X, which has its content moderation headquarters in Austin, Texas. X's former head of business operations, Joe Benarroch, told Bloomberg last year that it was aiming to hire 100 full-time workers for the team.
Meta didn't immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
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