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 $1.59 trillion company on Tuesday said 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 the roots of freedom of expression on Facebook and Instagram,” Meta CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg said in a video post.
President-elect Trump harshly criticized Zuckerberg during last year’s presidential campaign, suggesting that 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 Trump since his November victory, including visiting Trump’s mansion in Mar-a-Lago, 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 Donald Trump supporter, to its board of directors.
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.
Zuckerberg added that Meta will also make changes to its systems to “significantly reduce” the amount of content removed from the platform through automatic filters. This includes lifting restrictions on issues such as immigration and gender.
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.
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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.
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.” spoke.
Referring to President Trump’s return to the White House on January 20, Kaplan added: That’s the difference. ”
