Meta ends Facebook fact-checking program, as company returns to ‘prioritizing speech’

Facebook and Instagram owner Meta says it’s scrapping its third-party fact-checking program and replacing it with a Community Notes program written by users similar to the model used by Elon Musk’s social media platform X.

Starting in the US, Meta will end its fact-checking program with independent third parties. The company said it decided to end the program because expert fact-checkers had their own biases and too much content ended up being fact-checked.

Instead, it will pivot to a Community Notes model that uses crowdsourced fact-checking contributions from users.

“We’ve seen this approach work on X – where they empower their community to decide when posts are potentially misleading and need more context,” Meta’s Chief Global Affairs Officer Joel Kaplan says in a blog post.

The Associated Press had participated in Meta’s fact-checking program previously but ended its participation a year ago.

The social media company also says it plans to allow “more speech” by lifting some restrictions on some topics that are part of mainstream discussion in order to focus on illegal and “high severity violations” like terrorism, child sexual exploitation and drugs.

Meta says that its approach of building complex systems to manage content on its platforms has “gone too far” and has made “too many mistakes” by censoring too much content.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledges that the changes are in part sparked by political events including Donald Trump’s presidential election victory.

“The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech,” Zuckerberg says in an online video.

Meta’s quasi-independent Oversight Board, which was set up to act as a referee on controversial content decisions, says it welcomes the changes and looks forward to working with the company “to understand the changes in greater detail, ensuring its new approach can be as effective and speech-friendly as possible.”