Meta is ditching third-party fact-checkers on Facebook and Instagram

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a major shift in the company’s approach to moderation and speech. Meta will suspend its fact checking program and move to X mode Community Feedback Model on Facebook, Instagram and threads.

In the videoZuckerberg said Meta has “built a lot of complex systems to moderate content” in recent years. He added: “But the problem with complex systems is that they make mistakes. Even if they censor 1% of posts by mistake, that means millions of people.” It was “a lot of mistakes and a lot of oversight.”

To that end, he said, “We will return to our roots and focus on reducing errors, simplifying our policies, and restoring freedom of expression on our platforms.” This will start by switching to “Community Feedback, similar to X, starting with the US.”

The company plans to gradually roll out Community Feedback in the US over the next few months and iterate over the course of this year, removing fact-checkers and ending demoting of verified content. Meta will also make some content warning signs less obvious.

Meta’s new Chief Global Officer – W Nick Clegg’s replacement -Joel Kaplan he wrote in a blog post The company has seen its Community Feedback approach work on

Meta says it’s up to contributing users to write community feedback and decide which feedback will be applied to posts on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. “Just as in X, community feedback will require agreement among people with a range of viewpoints to help prevent biased evaluations,” Kaplan wrote. “We intend to be transparent about how different viewpoints impact the feedback displayed in our apps, and we are working on the right way to share this information.”

However, the community feedback model was not entirely without problems for X. Studies have shown that community feedback has to fail To prevent misinformation from spreading there. Elon Musk has defended the Community Notes approach but has applied some of it to his own posts to correct the falsehoods he spread. After an incident like that, Musk said accused “State actors” to manipulate the system. YouTube has it too Tested Community feedback form.

Meanwhile, Zuckerberg has had to make some other announcements, including simplifying some content policies and getting rid of “a host of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are far removed from mainstream discourse.” What started as a movement to be more inclusive has begun to be used Increasingly to suppress opinions and alienate people with different ideas, and it has gone so far, I want to make sure people can share their experiences and beliefs on our platforms.

When asked to provide more details about these policy changes, Meta directed Engadget to Kaplan’s blog post.

Additionally, the filters Meta used to search for any policy violations across its platforms will focus on “unlawful and high-risk violations.” These include terrorism, sexual exploitation of children, drugs, fraud and fraud. For other, less serious types of policy violations, Meta will rely more heavily on users submitting manual reports, but the bar for content removal will be higher.

“We will adjust our systems to require a higher degree of trust before removing a piece of content,” Kaplan wrote. In some cases, this means that multiple reviewers look at a specific piece of content before arriving at a decision on whether or not they want to remove it. Besides that, Meta is “working on ways to make account recovery more straightforward and testing facial recognition technology, and we have begun using AI large language models (LLMs) to provide a second opinion on some content before we take enforcement action.”

Last but not least, Meta says it’s taking a more personalized approach to political content across its platforms after trying this Make its programs politically neutral For the past few years. So, if you want to see more political stuff in your Facebook, Instagram, and Threads feeds, you’ll have the option to do so.

As is the case with Donate To Donald Trump’s inaugural fund, replacing longtime policy chief Nick Clegg with a former aide to George W. Bush and hiring Trump friend (and UFC CEO) Dana White to her board of directors, it’s very difficult to see these moves as anything other than meta to curry favor with the incoming administration.

Many Republicans have long criticized social media platforms, She accused them of censoring conservative voices. Meta itself banned Trump from using his platform accounts for years after he fanned the flames of the January 6, 2021 coup attempt. “His decision to use his platform to condone rather than condemn the actions of his supporters at the Capitol is truly troubled people in the United States and around the world.” Zuckerberg said at the time. “We believe the risks of allowing the President to continue using our service during this period are simply too great.” dead It has been removed Its restrictions on Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts last year.

Zuckerberg has explicitly said that Trump’s election win is part of the reason for the meta-politics shift, calling it a “cultural turning point” regarding freedom of expression. He said the company will work with Trump to respond to other governments, such as the Chinese government and some Latin American countries, that are “pushing for more censorship.”

“Europe has an ever-increasing number of laws that institutionalize censorship and make it difficult to build anything innovative there,” he claimed. Zuckerberg also took sharp criticism at the outgoing administration (over allegations of a censorship effort) and third-party fact-checkers, whom he claimed were “extremely politically biased and destroyed more trust than they created.”

These are all important changes for Meta platforms. On the one hand, allowing more types of speech may increase interaction without having to rely on, e.g. Garbage artificial intelligence robots. But the company may end up alienating many people who don’t want to deal with the kind of speech that could become more prevalent on Instagram, Facebook, and Threads now that Meta has lifted the shackles.

“Now we have an opportunity to restore freedom of expression, and I’m excited to seize it,” Zuckerberg said. While he noted that “it will take time to get this right and these complex systems will never be perfect,” and that the company will still need to work hard to remove illegal content, “the bottom line is that after years since our work in content moderation is primarily focused “On removing content, it’s time to focus on reducing errors, simplifying our systems, and getting back to our roots about giving people a voice.”

Updated January 7, 2:58 PM ET: Note that Meta responded to our request for comment.

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