Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced today (Tuesday) that Facebook and Instagram will be getting rid of their third-party fact-checkers and get back to their "roots around free expression," by adopting a system more in-line with the Community Notes used on the X platform.
“It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression on Facebook and Instagram,” Zuckerberg said in a video announcement. "I started social media to give people a voice. I gave a speech at Georgetown five years ago about the importance of protecting free expression and I still believe this today."
He said that in recent years, as concerns over hate speech and false information being spread online grew, "governments and legacy media have pushed to censor more and more. A lot of this is clearly political. But there is also a lot of legitimately bad stuff out there, drugs, terrorism, child exploitation. These are things that we take very seriously, and I want to make sure that we handle responsibly."
"So we built a lot of complex systems to moderate content," he noted. "But the problem with complex systems is they make mistakes. Even if they accidentally censor just 1% of posts, that's millions of people. And we've reached a point where it's just too many mistakes and too much censorship."
Calling the results of the 2024 US presidential election "a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech," Zuckerberg announced, “We’re replacing fact checkers with Community Notes, simplifying our policies and focusing on reducing mistakes."
In addition, Meta will "simplify our content policies and get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse."
"What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas, and it's gone too far. So I want to make sure that people can share their beliefs and experiences on our platforms," he said.
To that end, the filters used by Meta will be updated to focus on illegal activity and the most egregious violations of policy rather than to search for any violation of policy. The content-review staff will also be relocated from California to Texas, which also signals a shift away from policing speech.
Moreover, Meta is" going to work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world that are going after American companies and pushing to censor more."
Zuckerberg acknowledged that the tradeoff is that these changes will mean that more "bad content" will not be picked up and confronted than before.