Meta opts for Community Note, drops third party fact checking

Meta is scrapping its third-party fact-checking program and replacing it with Community Note similar to the model used by Elon Musk’s social media platform X.

The company said it decided to end the program because expert fact checkers had their own biases and too much content ended up being fact checked.

Instead, it will pivot to a Community Notes model that uses crowdsourced fact-checking contributions from users.

“We’ve seen this approach work on X – where they empower their community to decide when posts are potentially misleading and need more context,” Meta’s Chief Global Affairs Officer Joel Kaplan said in a blog post.

Kaplan said the new system will be phased in over the next couple of months, and the company will work on improving it over the year. As part of the transition, Meta will use labels to replace warnings overlaid on posts that it forces users to click through

Meta plans to allow “more speech” by lifting some restrictions on some topics that are part of mainstream discussion such as immigration and gender in order to focus on illegal and “high severity violations” like terrorism, child sexual exploitation and drugs.

Meta said that its approach of building complex systems to manage content on its platforms has “gone too far” and has made “too many mistakes” by censoring too much content.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged that the changes are in part sparked by political events including Donald Trump’s presidential election victory.