(Bloomberg) -- Meta Platforms Inc. will end third-party fact checking on its social media platforms in the US, letting users comment on posts’ accuracy with a community notes system it said will promote free expression.
Content moderation systems across the company’s platforms, which include Facebook, Instagram and Threads, have “gone too far,” and are blocking users’ free expression too often, Joel Kaplan, Meta’s chief global affairs officer, said in a blog post on Tuesday.
“Too much harmless content gets censored, too many people find themselves wrongly locked up in ‘Facebook jail,’ and we are often too slow to respond when they do,” said Kaplan, a former adviser to the George W. Bush White House who was named head of global affairs this month. The company will also make it easier for people who want to see more political posts to get additional content on their feeds.
The move to remove the system that was set up in 2016 to combat viral hoaxes aligns Meta more closely with Elon Musk’s X, which also relies on user notes to police accuracy on the site. President-elect Donald Trump, who was temporarily banned from Facebook in the wake of the Jan. 6, 2021 US Capitol riot, has called the platform “an enemy of the people” and accused the tech company of censoring conservative voices. Trump’s account was reinstated in 2023.
At a press conference Tuesday at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, Trump commended Meta for the elimination of outside fact-checking. “Honestly I think they’ve come a long way,” he said. Asked if the company was responding to threats he’s made — Trump at one point last year threatened Zuckerberg with imprisonment — the President-elect said, “probably.”
Meta first began working third-party fact-checkers in 2017, when it signed contracts with PolitiFact, Snopes, ABC News, Factcheck.org and the Associated Press. At the time, the company said paying outside firms helped identify misinformation without making Facebook the arbiter of truth.
Fact checkers’ biases showed up “in the choices some made about what to fact check and how” and too much legitimate political debate was muted, Kaplan said. One or two out of every 10 posts removed last month may have been taken down in error, he said in the post.
“To blame fact-checkers is a disappointing cop-out,” said Neil Brown, president of the Poynter Institute, which runs Politifact. “Facts are not censorship.”
Meta created the program and set the rules for the fact-checking program, and so “always held the cards,” he added.
“It’s unfortunate that this decision comes in the wake of extreme political pressure from a new administration and its supporters,” said Angie Drobnic Holan, director of the International Fact-Checking Network, which also worked with Meta.
Meta will also move the trust and safety teams that review US content from California to Texas, to help “remove the concern that biased employees are overly censoring content,” Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg said on Threads.
The company’s efforts to remove other types of harmful content, including child sexual abuse material and terrorist propaganda, are handled separately from third-party fact checking. Paris-based Teleperformance and New Jersey-based Cognizant are among the companies contracted by social media platforms to review this type of content, in conjunction with internal content moderation teams.
It may be more risky to remove fact checkers in the rest of the world, particularly Europe, where Meta is subject to European Union regulations requiring it to combat misinformation. The EU requires large platforms to actively cull deceptive political content and disinformation or risk heavy fines under the Digital Services Act. In response to emailed questions, Meta said there was no immediate plan to roll out the changes in the EU, and that any future change would be subject to a review of Meta’s obligations under EU law.
--With assistance from Gian Volpicelli and Hadriana Lowenkron.
(Updates with comment from Trump in fifth paragraph.)
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