Meta to ditch fact-checkers, push for more political content
4 Min Read
Mark Zuckerberg promised to prioritize free expression following Donald Trump's return to the White House.
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Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg listens during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing with other social media platform heads on Capitol Hill in Washington, on January 31, 2024. (AP)
Meta will get rid of fact-checkers, “dramatically reduce the amount of censorship,” and push for more political content on its platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, founder Mark Zuckerberg announced.
In a video address, Zuckerberg promised to prioritize free expression following Donald Trump's return to the White House, stating that, beginning in the United States, he will "get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with community notes similar to X."
X, Elon Musk's social media platform, has opted to rely on its users to provide context and caution around disputed content, meanwhile, Zuckerberg shared his frustrations with the company's past approach, stating, "Our fact-checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they've created."
To address concerns about content moderation, Zuckerberg revealed that Meta's moderation teams would be relocated from California to Texas, where "there is less concern about the bias of our teams." While he acknowledged that this move might lead to "catching less bad stuff," he emphasized the need for change.
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Meta, with its nearly 3 billion global users, also plans to loosen restrictions on topics, such as immigration and gender, which Zuckerberg described as "out of touch with mainstream discourse." In a broader statement, he mentioned working with figures like President Trump to "push back on governments around the world" that are trying to "censor more" and challenge American companies.
Zuckerberg highlighted the growing challenges posed by censorship laws in Europe, noting that the continent now has "an ever-increasing number of laws institutionalizing censorship, making it difficult to build anything innovative." He further pointed out that "Latin American countries have secret courts that can order companies to quietly take things down."
This development comes just days after Nick Clegg, the former UK deputy prime minister, announced his resignation as Meta's president of global affairs. Clegg will be succeeded by well-known Republican figure Joel Kaplan.
Meta's oversight board, co-chaired by former Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt, responded to the announcement with a statement expressing how she looks forward to the new approach, welcoming the declaration but adding that "it is essential that decisions on content are taken with maximum input from voices outside of Meta, including the people who use its platforms every day."
The statement thanked Nick Clegg who was "instrumental in overseeing the creation of the oversight board and has been a strong advocate for freedom of speech on Meta’s platforms," adding that it looks forward to Joel Kaplan's leadership in continuing the work.
Zuckerberg explained how complex systems were made to moderate content but noted that even complex systems "make mistakes, even if they accidentally censor just 1% 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 also detailed how recent elections reshaped cultural discourse to center around speech, detailing how removing restrictions on topics like gender and immigration would "ensure that people can share their beliefs and experiences on our platforms" and that the focus of filters that scan posts for policy violations would be shifted to only addressing illegal and high severity violations with Meta, relying on users to report lower severity violations before action is taken.
"By dialing them back, we're going to dramatically reduce the amount of censorship on our platforms," he asserted.
According to Zuckerberg, "We’re also going to tune our content filters to require much higher confidence before taking down content," highlighting how although it will catch "less bad stuff," the number of innocent posts and accounts taken down will be reduced.
