Facebook owner Meta will end its third-party fact-checking program and instead ask users to report misinformation, as the social media giant prepares for Donald Trump’s return to the presidency. It’s progressing.
The $1.6 trillion company said on Tuesday it would “encourage more speech by lifting restrictions on some topics that are part of mainstream discourse and focusing enforcement efforts on illegal and high-level violations.” “We will take a more personalized approach to political content.”
“It’s time to get back to our roots around freedom of expression on Facebook and Instagram,” said Mark Zuckerberg, CEO and co-founder of Meta. he said in a video post.
Mr Trump harshly criticized Mr Zuckerberg during last year’s presidential campaign, suggesting Mr Mehta would “spend the rest of his life in prison” if he interfered with the 2024 vote.
But the Facebook founder has sought to rebuild relations with the president-elect since his November victory, including a visit to his Mar-a-Lago mansion in Florida.
Meta Inc. on Monday made further inroads into the incoming U.S. president’s administration by appointing Dana White, the UFC founder and prominent Trump supporter, to its board of directors.
Mr. White will join Meta’s board of directors, along with another Mr. Trump ally, tech investor Marc Andreessen, who has long called for the company to ease regulations on online content.
Zuckerberg said the complexity of the content moderation system, which was expanded in December 2016 following President Trump’s first election, had resulted in “too many mistakes and too much censorship.”
From the US, Meta is moving to a so-called “community notes” model, similar to the one adopted by Elon Musk’s X, which allows users to add context to controversial or misleading posts. Meta itself does not write community notes.
Mehta said there are “no immediate plans” to eliminate third-party fact-checking and introduce community notes outside the United States. It is unclear how such systems will comply with regimes such as the EU’s Digital Services Act and the UK’s Online Safety Act, which require online platforms to take measures to combat illegal content and protect users. are.
Zuckerberg added that Meta will also make changes to its systems to “significantly reduce” the amount of content removed from the platform through automated filters.
This includes restrictions on themes such as immigration and gender to focus the system on content related to “illegal and high-severity violations” such as terrorism, child exploitation and fraud, as well as suicide, self-harm and eating disorders. This includes canceling the .
He acknowledged that the changes mean the meta is “harder to catch the bad guys,” but the trade-off is worth it to reduce the number of “innocent people’s” posts that get removed. he claimed.
The changes will put Mr. Zuckerberg in closer alignment with Mr. Musk, who drastically reduced content moderation after acquiring the social media platform then called Twitter in 2022.
“Just like we do with X, community notes will require consensus among people with different viewpoints to prevent biased evaluations,” Mehta said in a blog post.
“This is cool,” Musk said of the meta changes in an X post.
Joel Kaplan, a prominent Republican whose company Meta announced last week that he would replace Sir Nick Clegg as president of global affairs, told Fox News on Tuesday that third-party fact-checkers were “too biased.” he said.
Referring to President Trump’s return to the White House on January 20, Kaplan added: That’s the difference. ”
As part of the changes announced Tuesday, Meta also announced that it will be relocating its U.S.-based content moderation staff from California to Texas. “I think doing this work in a place where there’s less concern about bias on the team helps build trust,” Zuckerberg said.
The Meta changes were condemned by online safety activists. Ian Russell, whose 14-year-old daughter Molly took her own life after viewing harmful content on sites such as Instagram, said he was “disappointed” by the plan.
“These moves could have dire consequences for many children and young people,” he said.
Zuckerberg first introduced third-party fact-checking in late 2016 as part of a series of measures to address criticism of rampant misinformation on Facebook.
he said At the time, the company said it needed “stronger detection” of misinformation and planned to work with the news industry to learn from journalists’ fact-checking systems.
Meta said it currently spends billions of dollars a year on safety and security systems and employs or contracts tens of thousands of people around the world.
But Zuckerberg on Tuesday blamed the government and “legacy media” for forcing “increasing censorship” on his company.
He said Meta is working with the Trump administration to “go after American companies and push back against governments around the world that seek to increase censorship.”
He points to restrictive institutions in China and Latin America, as well as a “growing number” of European countries that he says “institutionalize censorship and make it difficult to build innovation there.” Emphasized the law.
Meta shares were down 2% on Tuesday morning to $616.11.
