Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta to replace third-party fact-checkers with community notes like ‘X’

Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta on Tuesday announced that it is replacing its fact-checking programme with a ‘community notes’ programme, a model similar to the one used by Elon Musk’s microblogging platform X, formerly Twitter.

The scrapping of the third-party fact-checking programme will begin with the United States.

The social media giant, which owns Facebook and Instagram, said that it has made this decision as expert fact checkers carried their own biases, adding that too much content ended up being fact-checked.

Meta Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s post on social media read, “We’re going to get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with community notes similar to X (formerly Twitter), starting in the US.” He added that “fact checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created, especially in the US.”

In a blog post, Meta’s Chief Global Affairs Officer Joel Kaplan said, “We have seen this approach work on X, where they empower their community to decide when posts are potentially misleading and need more context.”

Meta further said that it plans to allow “more speech” by removing some of the restrictions on selective topics that spoken about in mainstream discussions. This, it said, is to ensure focus on illicit and “high severity violations” like terrorism, drugs, and sexual exploitation.

Meanwhile, Zuckerberg said that the recently held US presidential elections “feel like a cultural tipping point towards, once again, prioritising speech”.

Notably, US President-elect Donald Trump has been a major critic of Meta and Zuckerberg in recent years, accusing the company of supporting liberal pieces and having bias against conservatives.

Last week, Meta, as part of its overhaul, had said that it will relocate its trust and safety teams from California to a more conservative Texas.

“That will help us build trust to do this work in places where there is less concern about the bias of our teams,” Zuckerberg said.

The social media giant also announced that it would reverse its 2021 policy of reducing political content across its platforms. Instead, it said it would allow a more personalized approach to allow users a greater control over the amount of political content they see on Meta platforms.