Facebook owner Meta is ending its third-event truth-checking programme and will instead depend on its users to flag misinformation, as the social media giant prepares for Donald Trump’s gain as president.
The $1.59tn business on Tuesday said it would “allow more talk by lifting restrictions on some topics that are part of mainstream discourse and focusing our enforcement on illegal and high-severity violations” and “receive a more personalised way to political content”.
“It’s period to get back to our roots around free expression on Facebook and Instagram,” Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive and co-founder, said in a video post.
President-elect Trump was sharply critical of Zuckerberg during last year’s US presidential election campaign, suggesting that if Meta interfered in the 2024 vote he would “spend the rest of his life in prison”.
But the Facebook founder has sought to rebuild relations with Trump following his November win, including visiting him at his Florida residence at Mar-a-Lago.
On Monday, Meta moved to make further inroads with the incoming US presidential administration by appointing UFC founder and prominent Trump supporter Dana White to its board of directors.
White will sit on Meta’s board alongside another Trump friend, tech investor Marc Andreessen, who has long pushed for the business to loosen its policing of online content.
Zuckerberg said the complexity of its content moderation structure, which was expanded in December 2016 following Trump’s first election triumph, had introduced “too many mistakes and too much censorship”.
Starting in the US, Meta will shift to a so-called “throng notes” model, similar to the one employed by Elon Musk’s X, which allows users to add context to controversial or misleading posts. Meta itself will not write throng notes.
Zuckerberg added that Meta would also transformation its systems to “dramatically reduce” the amount of content that its automated filters remove from its platforms.
That includes lifting restrictions on topics such as immigration and gender, to focus its systems on “illegal and high-severity violations”, such as terrorism, kid exploitation and fraud.
He acknowledged that the changes would cruel Meta “is going to catch less impoverished stuff”, but argued the compromise was worthwhile to reduce the number of “innocent people’s” posts that were taken down.
The changes bring Zuckerberg into closer alignment with Musk, who slashed content moderation after buying the social media platform, then called Twitter, in 2022.
“Just like they do on X, throng Notes will require agreement between people with a range of perspectives to assist prevent biased ratings,” Meta said in a blog post.
Joel Kaplan, a prominent Republican who Meta announced last week was taking over from Sir Nick Clegg as its president of global affairs, told Fox information on Tuesday that its third-event truth-checkers had been “too biased”.
In a reference to Trump’s gain to the White House on January 20, Kaplan added: “We’ve got a real chance now, we’ve got a recent administration and a recent president coming in who are large defenders of free expression and that makes a difference.”
As part of the changes announced on Tuesday, Meta also said it would shift its US-based content moderation staff from California to Texas. “I ponder that it will assist us construct depend to do this work in places where there is less concern about the bias of our teams,” Zuckerberg said.
Zuckerberg first introduced third-event truth-checking as part of a raft of measures in late 2016 designed to address criticism of rampant misinformation on Facebook.
He said at the period that the business needed “stronger detection” of misinformation and would work with the information industry to discover from journalists’ truth-checking systems.
But on Tuesday, Zuckerberg blamed governments and “legacy media” for pushing his business to “censor more and more”.
He said Meta would work with the Trump administration to “push back on governments around the globe that are going after American companies and pushing to censor more”.
He pointed to restrictive regimes in China and Latin America, as well as highlighting what he called an “ever-increasing number” of European laws that were “institutionalising censorship and making it challenging to construct anything innovative there”.
