Meta Is Replacing 3rd-Party Fact-Checkers With Community Notes

• Meta replaces third-party fact checkers with community notes on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads.
• Mark Zuckerberg said Meta will release notes similar to the X within the next few months.
• He added that Meta will return more political content to users’ feeds.

Meta replaces third-party fact checkers with a community notes model on Facebook, InstagramAnd Topics.

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, announced Tuesday that the company also plans to bring more political content back to users’ feeds and give them the ability to customize how much content they see.

The social media company is set to implement sweeping changes to content moderation over the next few months.

“First, we’re going to get rid of fact checks and replace them with X-like community notes, starting in the US,” Zuckerberg said in a video message. on Meta’s blog.

Meta’s newly appointed global communications director Joel Kaplan said in a blog post: “We’ve seen this approach work at X – where they give their community the power to decide when messages are potentially misleading and need more context, and people from a wide range points of view decides what context will be useful to other users.”

Kaplan said this approach is “less prone to bias.”

According to Kaplan, the company will also “simplify” its content policies and “get rid of a lot of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are simply not relevant to the mainstream discourse.”

Meta has come under fire in the past for its approach to content moderation. In August, Zuckerberg sent a letter to Republicans. Representative Jim Jordanwho chairs the House Judiciary Committee and is a vocal critic of Zuckerberg. Meta’s CEO said in his letter that the Biden administration repeatedly put pressure on the company in 2021 to remove COVID-19 related content and “expressed great disappointment” when the company disagreed.

X, then called Twitter, launched Community Notes in 2021, but the feature began appearing in more publications in 2023. Users can sign up to add context to posts that may contain misinformation or misleading content. Other users can rate how useful they find the note.

Like X, Meta will allow users to participate in writing and rating community notes, Kaplan said.

He added that Meta will move its trust and safety teams, which help moderate content, from California to Texas and other places in the US.

The move by the trust and safety teams follows a move by Austin-based content moderation company X. Last year, Joe Benarroch, X’s then head of business operations, said: Bloomberg that the platform was I plan to hire 100 full-time employees in a team.

Meta did not immediately respond to Business Insider’s request for comment.