Mark Zuckerberg has announced that Meta will get rid of fact-checkers and allow for more political content to be posted.
The action will be implemented across Meta platforms including Facebook, Instagram and Threads, and is set to “dramatically reduce the amount of censorship” implemented. This is a similar model to X (formerly known as Twitter), which relies on other users to add context and warnings to posts.
Zuckerberg announced the news in a new video, saying that the move for will begin in the United States and come in light of Donald Trump returning to The White House as US President.
“Fact-checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created,” the Meta founder said in the update, also adding that content moderation teams will be relocated from California to Texas where “there is less concern about the bias”.
Vowing to prioritise free speech, Zuckerberg said that Meta is also looking to “get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse”. He also added that he will “work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world that are going after American companies and pushing to censor more”.
Mark Zuckerberg announced Facebook will roll back some of its censorship policies to become a "free speech" platform. The Meta CEO said he's replacing the social media platform's fact-checkers with a community notes system. https://t.co/58JSs3nxDE pic.twitter.com/orhjz50Y47
— Newsweek (@Newsweek) January 7, 2025
Elaborating on the latter, the tech developer claimed that Europe was introducing “an ever-increasing number of laws” that both “institutionalise censorship and make it difficult to build anything innovative”. He would also say that “Latin American countries have secret courts that can order companies to quietly take things down”, and align the decision to remove fact-checkers to the comments he made in October 2019, where he discussed freedom of expression at Georgetown University.
In the new video shared on Meta, Zuckerberg also acknowledged the “bad stuff” that will come with the decision, and told viewers that filters will now only focus on tackling illegal and high severity violations.
“Governments and legacy media have pushed to censor more and more. A lot of this is clearly political, but there’s 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 them responsibly,” Zuckerberg said, as per The Guardian.
“But the problem with complex systems is they make mistakes, even if they accidentally censor just one per cent of posts, that’s millions of people, and we’ve reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship,” he added, going on to explain how the move will allow less “bad stuff” to be caught.
“By dialling them back, we’re going to dramatically reduce the amount of censorship on our platforms. We’re also going to tune our content filters to require much higher confidence before taking down content,” he explained. “The reality is that this is a tradeoff. It means we’re going to catch less bad stuff, but we’ll also reduce innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally take down.”
As highlighted by NBC News, the changes to Meta come as the platforms have begun to reverse course on content moderation in recent years. This was, in part many Republicans criticising the fact-checking system, labelling it as unfair and claiming that it plays in the favour of Democrats.
The Community Notes approach was introduced to Twitter by Elon Musk following his takeover of the platform, which he would later rebrand as X. While some feel it has allowed for more freedom of speech, it has also been widely linked to a rise in trolling, misogyny and racism.
Back in November for instance, the re-relection of Donald Trump as president was tied to a spike in sexism. One example of this was the surge in the phrase “Your body, my choice” on the site – a retaliatory play on “My body, my choice,” which is used by advocates of reproductive rights. As per NBC, there was a 4,600 per cent increase in mentions of the terms “your body, my choice” and “get back in the kitchen” on X in the 24 hours of Trump’s victory.
Before then, New York Times shared staggering statistics about the rise in bigotry on the platform following Musk’s takeover. According to the 2022 report, the average use of racial slurs towards Black people rose from 1,282 times a day 3,876 times a day after Musk took over the platform.
It also highlighted that homophobic slurs against gay men rose from an average of 2,506 to 3,964 times a day, and anti-Semitic posts referring to Jews or Judaism “soared more than 61 per cent in the two weeks after” Musk acquired the platform.
Meta has over three billion users globally, and the new announcement arrives just days after Nick Clegg (former UK deputy prime minister), confirmed that he would be stepping down as Meta’s president of global affairs and replaced by the prominent Republican Joel Kaplan.
In response to Zuckerberg’s latest announcement, Meta’s oversight board shared a statement reading: “We look forward to working with Meta in the coming weeks to understand the changes in greater detail, ensuring its new approach can be as effective and speech-friendly as possible.”
It continued: “It is essential that decisions on content are taken with maximum input from voices outside of Meta, including of the people who use its platforms every day.”
This is a developing story.