Social media giant Meta, formerly Facebook, plans to replace third-party fact-checkers with a community notes model akin to rival X’s to promote “free expression,” according to a Jan. 7 announcement.
Meta will also lift restrictions on “topics that are part of mainstream discourse” to focus enforcement on “illegal and high-severity violations” and enable users to “take a more personalized approach to political content,” Meta said.
“In recent years we’ve developed increasingly complex systems to manage content across our platforms, partly in response to societal and political pressure to moderate content. This approach has gone too far,” according to Meta’s blog post.
“[T]hey have expanded over time to the point where we are making too many mistakes, frustrating our users and too often getting in the way of the free expression we set out to enable,” it said.
Meta said the changes will affect Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. The social media platforms collectively serve billions of users worldwide.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg explains content moderation changes. Source: Meta
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Meta will replace third-party content moderation with a community notes program similar to what Elon Musk implemented on X, formerly Twitter, after buying the social media platform in 2023.
“We’ve seen this approach work on X – where they empower their community to decide when posts are potentially misleading and need more context, and people across a diverse range of perspectives decide what sort of context is helpful for other users to see,” Meta said.
Divergent perspectives
Musk has expressed support for Meta’s changes, describing them as “cool” in a Jan. 7 X post.
In a post on the social media platform Bluesky, US entrepreneur Mark Cuban accused Meta of seeking favor from President-elect Donald Trump, a self-avowed free speech advocate.
Cuban also suggested Meta might use unrestricted social media content to support its artificial intelligence initiatives.
Meta will “now have carte blanche to take posts that no longer have restrictions, making them a more explicit representation, and train [its] AI models,” Cuban said.
Mark Cuban criticizes Meta’s motives. Source: Bluesky
Musk supported Trump during the US elections in November. He will play an active role in Trump’s administration heading the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a private initiative seeking to curtail wasteful government spending.
Cuban was an outspoken proponent of Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump’s main rival for the presidency.
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