Meta ends fact-checking on Facebook and Instagram in favour of community notes

Meta is to scrap its longstanding fact-checking programme in favour of a community notes system similar to that on Elon Musk’s social media platform X.

Instead of using news organisations or other third-party groups as it does currently, Meta will rely on users to add notes to posts that might be false or misleading.

The changes will affect Facebook and Instagram, the company’s two largest social media platforms which have billions of users, as well as its newer platform Threads.

“We’re going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies and restoring free expression on our platforms,” chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said in a video.

“More specifically, here’s what we’re going to do. First, we’re going to get rid of fact checkers and replace them with community notes similar to X, starting in the US.

“It means that we’re going to catch less bad stuff, but we’ll also reduce the number of innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally take down.”

He added: “After Trump first got elected in 2016, the legacy media wrote non-stop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy.

“We tried in good faith to address those concerns without becoming the arbiters of truth.

“But the fact-checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created, particularly in the US.”

The policy signals a move towards a more conservative-leaning focus on free speech by Mr Zuckerberg, who met Donald Trump in November after he won the US election.

A community notes system is likely to please the president-elect, who criticised Meta’s fact-checking feature for penalising conservative voices.

Meta donated a million dollars to support Mr Trump’s inauguration in December, and has since appointed several Trump allies to high-ranking positions at the firm.

Nick Clegg, the former UK deputy prime minister, also left the social media giant last week, where he had been president of global affairs.

Mr Clegg has been replaced by Joel Kaplan, a prominent Republican and former senior adviser to George W Bush.

Dana White, the head of the Ultimate Fighting Championship and a close ally of Mr Trump, was also appointed to Meta’s board.

Meta said it plans to bring in the community notes function in the US over the next few months and will “continue to improve it” over the year.

It will also stop demoting fact-checked posts and make labels indicating when something is misleading less “obtrusive”.

In a statement, Mr Kaplan added that Meta’s moderation policies had “gone too far”.

Referring to its incoming system, he said: “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.”

Since Mr Musk bought X in 2022 it has faced heavy criticism over its approach to posts containing misinformation or hateful content.

In November, the Centre for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a non-profit organisation, left the platform, saying the billionaire had turned it into a “dangerous, troubled space where hate, conspiracy theories and lies have privileged access to the megaphone”.

The centre had previously published research which found the platform, formerly known as Twitter, failed to act on 99% of hate posted by paid subscribers.

Mr Musk sued the CCDH but the case was thrown out by a US judge who said it was “evident” X Corp did not like being criticised.

Mr Kaplan said Meta would also begin loosening some of its rules around content moderation, saying it wanted to “undo the mission creep that has made our rules too restrictive and too prone to over-enforcement”.

He said the site would “remove restrictions” on topics that are the subject of frequent political debate – including immigration, gender identify and gender – adding that it was “not right” that things could be said on the floor of the US Congress but not on Meta platforms.

Mr Kaplan also said Meta would stop using automated systems to scan for policy violations for “less severe violations” and would rely on users reporting an issue before taking action.

He confirmed Meta would continue to use automated systems for “illegal and high-severity violations”, such as terrorism, child sexual exploitation, drugs, fraud and scams, but said automated moderation had resulted in “too many mistakes and too much content being censored”.

One online safety charity said it was “dismayed” by the decision.

Ian Russell, chairman of the Molly Rose Foundation (MRF), said the decision was a “major concern for safety online”.

The MRF was set up by Mr Russell and his family in memory of his daughter, who killed herself aged 14 in November 2017 after viewing harmful content on social media.

“We are dismayed that the company intends to stop proactive moderation of many forms of harmful content and to only act if and when a user complaint is received,” Mr Russell said.

“Meta currently claims the overwhelming majority of harmful material they remove is found by themselves rather than reported by users.

“We are urgently clarifying the scope of these measures, including whether this will apply to suicide, self-harm and depressive content.

“These moves could have dire consequences for many children and young adults.”

Asked what the UK Government’s response was to the move, Downing Street said it was a “matter for Meta”.

On whether there were concerns that policies espoused by American social media companies like Meta and X, owned by Elon Musk, could become a point of conflict with Donald Trump’s administration, a Number 10 spokesman said: “I’m not going to get ahead of the incoming US administration.

“As we’ve said repeatedly, our relationship with the US is a very important one.”

He added the UK’s online safety provisions coming in March are “among the strongest in the world” and the Government expects them to be “robustly” enforced by regulator Ofcom.