Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said on Tuesday that his company was going to phase out fact checkers and replace Facebook and Instagram's content moderation apparatus with a community notes system similar to X, citing the recent US election.
“The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards, once again, prioritising speech,” he said in a video posted to Meta's Instagram platform.
The announcement from Mr Zuckerberg comes after years of criticism against Meta for not adequately dealing with hate speech, disinformation and other questionable content posted to Facebook and later Instagram.
“We're going to get rid of fact checkers and replace them with community notes similar to X, starting in the US after [Donald] Trump first got elected in 2016 the legacy media wrote non-stop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy,” Mr Zuckerberg said.
“We tried, in good faith, to address those concerns without becoming the arbiters of truth, but the fact checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they've created, especially in the US.”
As Meta's chief executive and founder acknowledged in his video, community notes are a prominent feature of X that allow users to provide more information as well as present evidence contradicting posts or content that violates the platform's terms of service.
Those posts on X that are deemed to be inaccurate are later given notes that explain the inaccuracy of the posts in detail. Average users, government officials and celebrities have been among those flagged with community notes.
Anyone can sign up to be a community note contributor on X, with applications approved on a periodic basis.
Neil Chilson, former chief technologist for the Federal Trade Commission during the first Trump administration and currently head of artificial intelligence policy at the Abundance Institute, a non-profit organisation that supports emerging technologies, praised the announcement.
“Meta’s changes are a win for online communication and society,” he said. “Progress depends on open debate and the free exchange of ideas. Social media is transformative, but its potential is lost when platforms stifle discussion. By empowering users, Meta is improving the free speech ecosystem online.”
But Meta's announcement also drew ample criticism from those who accused the company of weakening its content moderation policy.
“Well this is utter codswallop from this site’s persistently ethically challenged owner, Mark Zuckerberg,” technology analyst, critic and podcaster Kara Swisher wrote on Meta's Threads platform.
“Let me say for the record that factcheckers make mistakes – but they are part of a broader ecosystem that balances safety with free speech and at least considers malevolent liars the problem. Mark is truly, as I wrote, the most dangerous person of the current Information Age and that includes Elon Musk.”
Mr Zuckerberg's video comes at a potentially turbulent time for the company amid a highly polarised political climate in the US.
Several days ago, Meta sent shock waves through the technology and political world when it announced that a former George W Bush official Joel Kaplan, already a Meta employee, would replace Nick Clegg – who formerly led the UK's Liberal Democrats – as Meta's chief global affairs officer.
It also comes on the heels of news reports that Mr Zuckerberg and Meta donated $1 million to Mr Trump's inauguration fund.
And on Monday, Meta said UFC president and Trump ally Dana White would be joining as new member of the company’s board of directors.
Recent announcements have amplified concerns from those on the political left that Meta, owner of some of the world's most influential social media platforms, would be allowing conservative US figures to direct aspects of its operations.
In response to the company's announcement about removing third-party fact checkers, Lina Khan, a Biden appointee to head the FTC, also seemed dismayed by Meta's plans.
“We should have an economy where the decisions of a single company or a single executive are not having extraordinary impact on speech online,” the frequent critic of Big Tech told CNBC's Squawk Box.
Shortly after Mr Zuckerberg's video was posted to Instagram, Mr Kaplan explained the company's forthcoming change to a community notes-based content moderation policy.
“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,” he wrote.
“We think this could be a better way of achieving our original intention of providing people with information about what they’re seeing – and one that’s less prone to bias.”
The programme, according to Mr Kaplan, would begin in a couple of months, but users can sign up on Meta's website to be “among the first contributors” when it is officially up and running.
According to Mr Zuckerberg's video, Meta would still work hard to independently remove illegal content involving terrorism, drugs and child exploitation, to name a few items.
X appeared supportive of the move, with chief executive Linda Yaccarino saying: “Fact-checking and moderation doesn't belong in the hands of a few select gatekeepers who can easily inject their bias into decisions. It's a democratic process that belongs in the hands of many.”
Politics and moving from California to Texas
Mr Zuckerberg also said that he planned on moving the company's existing content review team from California to Texas.
“I think that will help us build trust to do this work in places where there is less concern about the bias of our teams,” he explained.
Somewhat buried in the announcement, however, was that Meta also plans to stop the current policy of cracking down on political posts, something that has been critiqued by news organisations, journalists and politicians on both sides.
“It feels like we're in a new era now, and we're starting to get feedback that people want to see this content again,” said Meta's chief executive. “So we're going to start phasing this back into Facebook, Instagram and Threads, while working to keep the communities friendly and positive.”
Meta has been a target of frequent criticism by elected officials over censorship issues.
After the 2016 presidential election, many Democrats accused the company of failing to flag and eliminate disinformation campaigns based out of Russia that flooded the platform. Republicans, in turn, said that Meta had disproportionately dampened their free speech by blocking content.
Months before the most recent presidential election, Mr Zuckerberg told a committee in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives that he and his company regretted bowing to pressure from President Joe Biden's administration to censor various pieces of Covid-19 content that appeared on the company’s Facebook and Instagram platforms.
As for the latest announcement from Meta about content moderation, those in conservative circles say that Meta is finally hearing their concerns.
“Meta’s announcement of a course correction on how they moderate content is a step in the right direction,” said Jessica Melugin, director of the Centre for Technology and Innovation at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
