Mark Zuckerberg says Meta will replace 3rd-party fact-checkers with community notes
BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/ Getty Images
- Meta is replacing third-party fact-checkers with community notes on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads.
- Mark Zuckerberg said Meta would roll out the notes, similar to X's, over the next few months.
- He added that Meta would bring back more political content to users' timelines.
Meta is replacing third-party fact-checkers with a community-notes model on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads.
Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, announced Tuesday that the company also planned to bring more political content back to the users' timelines and give them the option to customize how much of it they see.
The social media company is set to implement the sweeping content-moderation changes over the next few months.
"First, we are going to get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with community notes, similar to X, starting in the US," Zuckerberg said in a video message on Meta's blog.
Meta's recently appointed chief global-affairs officer, Joel Kaplan, said in the blog: "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."
Kaplan said the approach was "less prone to bias."
The company will also "simplify" its content policies, Kaplan said, and "get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse."
Meta has faced scrutiny in the past for its approach to content moderation. In August, Zuckerberg sent a letter to Republican Rep. Jim Jordan, who chairs the House Judiciary Committee and has been a vocal critic of Zuckerberg. The Meta CEO said in his letter that the Biden administration repeatedly pressured the company in 2021 to remove COVID-19-related content and "expressed a lot of frustration" when the company did not agree.
X, called Twitter at the time, launched community notes in 2021, but the feature started appearing on more posts in 2023. Users can sign up to add context to posts that might contain misinformation or misleading content. Other users can rate how helpful they find the note.
Similar to X, Meta will let users contribute to the writing and rating of community notes, Kaplan said.
He added that Meta would move its trust and safety teams, which help moderate content, from California to Texas and other locations in the US.
The relocation of the trust and safety teams follows a move by X, which has its content-moderation headquarters in Austin. Last year, Joe Benarroch, X's head of business operations at the time, told Bloomberg that the platform was aiming to hire 100 full-time workers for the team.
Meta didn't immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.