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Facebook owner Meta is ending its fact-checking system and will instead rely on its users to flag lies, as the social media giant prepares for Donald Trump's return as president.
The $1.59tn company said on Tuesday that it would “allow more speech by removing restrictions on certain topics that are part of normal conversation and emphasize our enforcement of illegal and serious crimes” and “take a personal approach to political content”.
“It's time to get back to our roots about freedom of expression on Facebook and Instagram,” Mark Zuckerberg, Meta's chief executive and co-founder, said in a video post.
President-elect Donald Trump was highly critical of Zuckerberg during last year's US presidential election, suggesting that if Meta interfered in the 2024 vote he would “spend the rest of his life in prison”.
But the Facebook founder wants to build a relationship with Trump after his November victory, including visiting him at his Florida estate at Mar-a-Lago.
On Monday, Meta took a step forward in the upcoming US presidential administration by appointing UFC founder and prominent supporter of Donald Trump Dana White to its board of directors.
Zuckerberg said the complexity of the content moderation system, which was expanded in December 2016 after Trump's first election victory, introduced “a lot of mistakes and a lot of censorship”.
Starting in the US, Meta will move to so-called “public notes”, similar to those employed by Elon Musk's X, which allow users to add content to controversial or misleading posts. Meta itself will not write public articles.
Zuckerberg added that Meta will also change its systems to “significantly reduce” the amount of content that its automatic filters remove from its platforms. That includes removing restrictions on topics such as immigration and gender.
He acknowledged that the change would mean that Meta would “catch less bad stuff”, but argued that the trade-off was worth reducing the number of “innocent people's” posts taken down.
The change brings Zuckerberg closer together with Musk, who reduced content moderation after buying the social media platform, called Twitter, in 2022.
“Like they did at X, Community Notes will seek consensus among people with a range of views to help prevent discriminatory ratings,” Meta said in a blog post.
Joel Kaplan, the well-known Republican Meta announced last week that he is replacing Sir Nick Clegg as world affairs president, told Fox News on Tuesday that his third-party inspectors were “very biased”.
Referring to Trump's return to the White House on January 20, Kaplan added: “We have a real opportunity now, we have a new administration and a new president who will be great defenders of free speech and that makes a difference.”