Social media giant Meta scraps fact-checking for ‘community notes’

Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, says allowing fact-checkers to assess content ‘became a tool to censor’.

The social media giant Meta, which owns Instagram and Facebook, has announced the end of its third-party fact-checking programme in the United States, saying that it will encourage “more speech” on its platform.

The move, revealed on Tuesday, comes as tech executives embrace incoming US President Donald Trump, whose right-wing supporters have long decried online content moderation as a tool of censorship.

Instead of third-party fact-checkers, Meta said it will rely on “community notes”, similar to those used on the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter.

There, contributors draft factual corrections to posts that become visible only after being endorsed by other contributors with different points of view.

Meta’s Chief Global Affairs Officer Joel Kaplan said the previous fact-checking initiative, launched in 2016, aimed for independent experts to provide more accurate information about viral hoaxes. But, he added, that’s “not the way things played out”.

“Over time we ended up with too much content being fact checked that people would understand to be legitimate political speech and debate,” Kaplan said in a statement.

“Our system then attached real consequences in the form of intrusive labels and reduced distribution. A program intended to inform too often became a tool to censor.”

Meta, which donated $1m to Trump’s inauguration fund last month, also announced it would remove restrictions on controversial political subjects, including immigration and gender identity.

“It’s not right that things can be said on TV or the floor of Congress, but not on our platforms,” Kaplan said, adding that the changes will take a few weeks to implement.

In a separate video message, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company will move its content moderation team from liberal California to Republican-leaning Texas.

“I think that will help us build trust to do this work in places where there is less concern about the bias of our teams,” Zuckerberg said in a video message.

He added that the company will ease its moderation filters and raise the bar for taking down posts over possible policy violations.

“The reality is that this is a trade-off,” Zuckerberg said. “It means we’re going to catch less bad stuff, but we’ll also reduce the number of innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally take down.”

In the wake of the announcement, President-elect Trump praised Zuckerberg during a press conference at his Mar-a-Lago resort.

“I think they’ve come a long way,” Trump said of Meta and Zuckerberg, adding: “The man was very impressive.”

When a reporter asked if the decision resulted from threats Trump had made to social media companies in the past, the president-elect offered a short response: “Probably.”

While much of the debate over social media content moderation in the US revolves around domestic topics, COVID-19 and election interference, Palestinian rights supporters have long accused Meta of censoring their posts.

In 2023, Human Rights Watch released a report accusing Meta of “silencing voices in support of Palestine and Palestinian human rights”.

The group said it documented more than 1,000 takedowns of posts that were “unduly suppressed” on Meta platforms between October and November of that year.