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Meta’s Getting Rid of Fact-Checks and Switching to Community Notes


Well, if there was any question about whether Meta wanted to better align with the incoming Trump administration, that now seems pretty clear.

Today, CEO of Meta Mark Zuckerberg has announced that the company is ending its fact-checking program and moving to an X-style “Community Notes” system for clarifying user claims in its apps, while also looking to bring more political content back into its apps.

According to Zuckerberg:

“We have reached a point where [our moderation systems] make too many mistakes, and that’s too much censorship. The recent election also feels like a cultural turning point toward re-prioritizing speech. So we will go back to our roots and focus on reducing errors, simplifying our rules and restoring freedom of expression on our platforms.”

Zuckerberg refers to his speech at Georgetown University in 2019in which he emphasized his commitment to free expression in Meta’s applications. A lot has changed since then, and now, despite the Meta watching to completely move away from the political contentin line, it claims, with user requests, Zuckerberg says the time has come to bring more political and civic discussion back to Meta’s apps.

Why? As platforms are being pushed to censor more, by “legacy media” and others:

“A lot has happened in the last few years. There was widespread debate about the potential harms of online content, governments and legacy media were increasingly censoring.”

As for specifics, Zuckerberg says Meta will remove its own restrictions on topics like immigration and gender “that are out of touch with mainstream discourse.

On another front, the company is also moving its trust and safety and content moderation teams from California and shifting its content review efforts to Texas, where X construction of a new center for content moderation.

Meta’s new director of global affairs, Joel Kaplan, made the first announcement of the update at Fox Newswhere he also referred to Meta’s fundamental mission of enabling freedom of speech.

According to Chaplain:

In recent years, we have developed increasingly complex systems for managing the content on our platforms, partly in response to social and political pressure to moderate content. This approach has gone too far. As well-intentioned as many of these attempts are, over time they have expanded to the point where we make too many mistakes, frustrate our users, and too often get in the way of the free expression we intended to enable.”

So Meta wants to address mistakes here, and it has nothing to do with pressure from the new Trump administration. Yes, that’s it.

In Community Notes, Kaplan says this approach has worked at X, “where they empower their community to decide when posts are potentially misleading and need more context.”

Which it isn’t, not in the sense Kaplan suggests. But Kaplan says he believes this may be “a better way to achieve our original intent of giving people information about what they see—and a way that’s less prone to bias.

And yes, it will include the most prominent bug in X’s Community Notes system:

Just as they do on X, Community Notes will require agreement between people with a range of perspectives to prevent biased evaluations.”

This specific element limited the application capacity of community notes some of the most divisive, politically motivated content on the appbecause on some issues, such as election interference, immigration, “stolen” elections, etc., there will never be a full spectrum of agreement. As such, reports revealed that the vast majority of suggested community notes are never displayed.

Community Notes Report

It is also worth noting that X has less than a tenth of Meta’s audience reach.

You can imagine what the effect of the same could be at Meta’s level.

Indeed, X is already a hive of unverified false claims and misinformation, primarily led by X owner Elon Musk himself. It seems less likely that Zuckerberg will interfere, although the outcome will be largely the same, while the change in policy also contradicts Meta’s previous notes that its users They are fed up with divisive political commentary taking over their feeds.

This was the original, communicated motivation for Meta to completely deprioritize political content, which, according to Zuckerberg (back in 2021):

“One of the main pieces of feedback we’re hearing from our community right now is that people don’t want the politics and struggle to take over their experience on our services.”

A combination of negative user feedback and media criticism of the company, along with the rise of short-form videos primarily focused on light-hearted material, gave Meta the opportunity to move away from the divisive policy entirely, and the company even added inclusion of political content on Threads.

But now it’s going in the opposite direction and I can only imagine that this request came from the President-elect himself.

Back in November, after Trump’s election victory, Zuckerberg traveled to Mar-a-Lago have dinner with Trumpin what many saw as a surprising twist.

Surprising, because Trump threatened in a recently published book about his presidency jail Zuckerberg for life if he ever returns to power, because of Zuckerberg’s perceived political interference by censoring Trump’s Facebook posts.

It now seems pretty clear how that meeting went down, with Trump demanding that Zuckerberg:

  • Remove Nick Clegg as global head of public affairs. Clegg was the man who called for Trump’s account to be suspended after the 2021 Capitol riots.
  • Install more Republicans in key roles in the application. Meta’s new public affairs chief, Kaplan, worked in previous Republican administrations, while key Trump supporter Dana White was now elected to Meta’s administration
  • Move to the Community Notes model for moderation, because Elon probably told Trump that’s the best path to truth in social apps

The implementation of these changes will no doubt ease the way for Meta on various fronts over the next four years. And while Meta is now seeking to recast its rationale to justify these changes, the social impact will be negative, as Meta well knows.

Which raises questions about how much Meta ever cared about its public safety responsibilities, and how much Zuckerberg’s statements and apologies about it ever meant.

The bottom line is that the Community Notes model functions only as a supplemental element to a full-fledged moderating approach, enabling broader and faster action to address misinformation in social applications. It won’t work at the Meta level and will lead to worse results on this front, for everyone.

But for Meta, work clearly comes first.

Meta says it will gradually roll out Community Notes to its apps over the next few months.



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