Facebook and Instagram get rid of truth checkers

Meta is abandoning the use of independent truth checkers on Facebook and Instagram, replacing them with X-style “throng notes” where commenting on the accuracy of posts is left to users.

In a video posted alongside a blog post by the business on Tuesday, chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said third-event moderators were “too politically biased” and it was “period to get back to our roots around free expression”.

The shift comes as Zuckerberg and other tech executives seek to enhance relations with US President-elect Donald Trump before he takes office later this month.

Trump and his Republican allies have criticised Meta for its truth-checking policy, calling it censorship of correct-wing voices.

Speaking after the changes were announced, Trump told a information conference he was impressed by Zuckerberg’s selection and that Meta had “arrive a long way”.

Asked whether Zuckerberg was “directly responding” to threats Trump had made to him in the history, the incoming US president responded: “Probably”.

Joel Kaplan, a prominent Republican who is replacing Sir Nick Clegg as Meta’s global affairs chief, wrote that the business’s reliance on independent moderators was “well-intentioned” but had too often resulted in censoring.

Campaigners against despise talk online reacted with dismay to the transformation – and suggested it was really motivated by getting on the correct side of Trump.

“Zuckerberg’s announcement is a blatant attempt to cozy up to the incoming Trump administration – with harmful implications”, said Ava Lee, from Global Witness, a campaign throng which describes itself as seeking to hold large tech to account.

“Claiming to avoid “censorship” is a political shift to avoid taking responsibility for despise and disinformation that platforms inspire and facilitate,” she added.

Meta’s current truth checking programme, introduced in 2016, refers posts that appear to be untrue or misleading to independent organisations to assess their credibility.

Posts flagged as inaccurate can have labels attached to them offering viewers more information, and be moved lower in users’ feeds.

That will now be replaced “in the US first” by throng notes.

Meta says it has “no immediate plans” to get rid of its third-event truth checkers in the UK or the EU.

The recent throng notes structure has been copied from X, which introduced it after being bought and renamed by Elon Musk.

It involves people of different viewpoints agreeing on notes which add context or clarifications to controversial posts.

“This is chilly,” he said of Meta’s adoption of a similar mechanism.

After concerns were raised around self-damage and depressive content, Meta clarified that there would be “no transformation to how we treat content that encourages suicide, self-injury, and eating disorders”.

truth-checking organisation packed truth – which participates in Facebook’s program for verifying posts in Europe – said it “refutes allegations of bias” made against its profession.

The body’s chief executive, Chris Morris, described the transformation as a “disappointing and a backwards step that risks a chilling result around the globe.”

Alongside content moderators, truth checkers sometimes describe themselves as the internet’s emergency services.

But Meta bosses have concluded they have been intervening too much.

“Too much harmless content gets censored, too many people discover themselves wrongly locked up in “Facebook jail,” and we are often too leisurely to respond when they do,” wrote Joel Kaplan on Tuesday.

But Meta does appear to acknowledge there is some hazard involved – Zuckerberg said in his video the changes would cruel “a trade off”.

“It means we’re going to catch less impoverished stuff, but we’ll also reduce the number of innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally receive down,” he said.

The way is also at odds with recent regulation in both the UK and Europe, where large tech firms are being forced to receive more responsibility for the content they carry or face steep penalties.

So it’s perhaps not surprising that Meta’s shift away from this line of supervision is US-only, for now at least.

Meta’s blog post said it would also “undo the mission creep” of rules and policies.

“It’s not correct that things can be said on TV or the floor of Congress, but not on our platforms,” it added.

It comes as technology firms and their executives prepare for Trump’s inauguration on 20 January.

Several CEOs have publicly congratulated Trump on his profitability to office, while others have travelled to Trump’s Florida estate Mar-Lago to meet with the incoming president, including Zuckerberg in November. Meta has also donated $1m to an inauguration pool for Trump.

“The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards, once again, prioritising free talk,” said Zuckerberg in Tuesday’s video.

Meta notified Trump’s throng of the policy transformation before the announcement, the recent York Times reported.

Kaplan replacing Sir Nick – a former Liberal Democrat deputy prime minister – as the business’s president of global affairs has also been interpreted as a signal of the firm’s shifting way to moderation and its changing political priorities.

The business also announced on Monday that Dana White, a close Trump friend and president of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, would join its board of directors.

Kate Klonick, associate professor of law at St John’s University Law School, said the changes reflected a pattern “that has seemed inevitable over the last few years, especially since Musk’s takeover of X”.

“The private governance of talk on these platforms has increasingly become a point of politics,” she told BBC information.

Where companies have previously faced pressure to construct depend and safety mechanisms to deal with issues like harassment, despise talk, and disinformation, a “radical swing back in the opposite path” is now underway, she added.