Meta to drop third-party fact-checking, adopt community notes

Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, is discontinuing its third-party fact-checking programme in favour of adopting a ‘community notes’ model, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced in a video shared on his Instagram account.

This approach mirrors the crowdsourced fact-checking system used by Elon Musk-owned social media platform X, called 'community notes', where users add context to posts, and notes are displayed only when contributors from diverse perspectives agree on their value.

Zuckerberg said in the video, "It is time to get back to our roots around free expressions on Facebook and Instagram. I started building social media to give people a voice… And I still believe this today.”

“We built a lot of complex systems to moderate content. But the problem with complex systems is they make mistakes. Even if they accidentally censor just 1% of posts, that is millions of people. And we have now reached a point where it is too many mistakes and too much censorship,” the Meta chief added.

“So we are going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies, and restoring free expression on our platforms,” he noted.

Zuckerberg elaborated that Meta will replace fact-checkers with community notes, starting in the United States, simplify its content policies, adopt a new approach to policy enforcement, reintroduce civic content, and reorganise its trust and safety and content moderation teams.

This development comes as Donald Trump is set to begin his second term as the US president.

Zuckerberg stated, “We are going to work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world, going after American companies and pushing to censor more… The only way that we can push back on this global trend is with the support of the US government.”

Meta’s Chief Global Affairs Officer, Joel Kaplan, highlighted that the community notes approach used on X empowers users to identify misleading posts and collaboratively determine the most helpful context from diverse perspectives.

Once the programme is launched, Meta will not create or select community notes; instead, they will be written and rated by users. Similar to X, the model will require agreement from people with diverse perspectives to prevent bias. 

Meta aims to be transparent about how different viewpoints influence the notes displayed, and is working on the best way to share this information, Kaplan said.

The social media company plans to roll out community notes in the US over the next few months, with ongoing improvements throughout the year, he added.