Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a series of major changes to the company’s moderation policies and practices on 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 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 gonna 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.”xs
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.”
Beyond the end of the facet-checking program, Zuckerberg said the company will be eliminating some content politics around hot-button issues including immigration and gender, and re-focus the company’s automated moderation systems on what he called high-severity violations and rely on users to report other violations. Facebook will also be moving its trust and safety and content moderation team from California to Texas.
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