Meta replaces fact-checking with X-style community notes

Bending to the political headwinds of the incoming Trump administration, Facebook and Instagram owner Meta is scrapping its third-party fact-checking program and replacing it with “community notes” written by users similar to the model used by Elon Musk’s social platform X.

Announcing the policy shift Tuesday, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the latest election heralded “a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech.”

The tech giant said expert fact checkers have their own biases and too much content ends up being fact checked, and that it is pivoting to crowdsourcing 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. He said the new system will be phased in over the coming months.

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Meta is among several tech companies apparently working to get in Trump’s good graces before he takes office later this month. Meta and Amazon each donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund in December, and Zuckerberg had dinner with Trump at the his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida, bringing together the Facebook founder and the former president who was once banned from his social network.

Meta this week appointed Dana White, the president and CEO of Ultimate Fighting Championship and a familiar figure in Trump’s orbit, to its board of directors. Kaplan, a former adviser to George W. Bush, was announced as the head of Meta’s global affairs on Jan. 2.

Meta began fact checks in December 2016 after Donald Trump was elected president for the first time, in response to criticism that “fake news” was spreading on its platforms. For years, the tech giant boasted it was working with more than 100 organizations in over 60 languages to combat misinformation.

The Associated Press ended its participation in Meta’s fact-checking program a year ago.

The tech company said the new system will allow “more speech” by lifting restrictions on discussions of certain mainstream topics, such as immigration and gender, and focus on curbing illegal and “high severity violations,” including 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.

“Meta is repositioning the company for the incoming Trump administration,” said Emarketer analyst Jasmine Enberg. “The move will elate conservatives, who’ve often criticized Meta for censoring speech, but it will spook many liberals and advertisers, showing just how far Zuckerberg is willing to go to win Trump’s approval.”

In a shift driven largely by Musk, third-party fact-checking “has gone out of fashion among social executives,” Enberg added. “Social platforms have become more political and polarized, as misinformation has become a buzzword that encompasses everything from outright lies to viewpoints people disagree with.”

Washington experts weigh in on Meta’s shift

Misinformation experts in the state of Washington doubt the authenticity of the platform’s stated motivations.

Amy Zhang, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Washington, previously worked on fact-checking platforms for both Facebook and then-Twitter. She told KIRO Newsradio that parent company Meta already explored options to transition toward a Community Notes-style program in 2018.

She questions the tech giant’s timing now, pointing to “Republicans kind of coming into office and the politicization of topics like content moderation.”

“I see this announcement as a response to that,” she said.

Kate Starbird, a co-founder of UW’s Center for an Informed Public – whose stated purpose is to combat “strategic misinformation” – criticized Zuckerberg in a thread of posts to X’s primary competitor, BlueSky.

“I have a nasty cold, but what’s more sickening is to see Meta & Zuckerberg succumb to this framing equating ‘censorship’ with labeling content (with) fact-checks,” she wrote. “Fact-checking was speech that conservatives didn’t like, so they leaned on Meta not to do it. Isn’t that political censorship? C’mon.”

She cited research published in Nature Communications that showed conservative-leaning users as more likely to share “low-quality” information, and thus more likely to be penalized for doing so.

“Fact-checking wasn’t ‘biased’ against conservatives,” Starbird wrote. “Conservatives just shared more false content. If there’s a sportsball game and one team fouls four times as much, it’s not ‘biased’ for the (referee) to call four times as many fouls against that team.”

KIRO Newsradio reached out to Starbird, who was not available to interview by the time of publication.

Other reactions to the Meta fact-checking move

X’s approach to content moderation has led to the loss of some advertisers, but Enberg said Meta’s “massive size and powerhouse ad platform insulate it somewhat from an X-like user and advertiser exodus.” Even so, she said, any major drop in user engagement could hurt Meta’s ad business.

Meta’s quasi-independent Oversight Board, which acts as a referee of controversial content decisions, said it welcomes the changes and looks forward to working with the company “to understand the changes in greater detail, ensuring its new approach can be as effective and speech-friendly as possible.”

Reaction to Meta’s changes fell largely along political lines.

On X, Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio called it a “huge step in the right direction.”

Others were skeptical and said the move wasn’t enough to make them trust Zuckerberg.

“Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me,” Rep. Mike Lee of Utah wrote on X. “Can any of us assume Zuckerberg won’t return to his old tricks?”

On Trump’s Truth Social platform, users didn’t hold back from their ongoing criticism of the Meta CEO, calling him a “snake” and “the enemy.”

Alexios Mantzarlis, director of the Security, Trust, and Safety Initiative at Cornell Tech and a former director of the International Fact-Checking Network, said the change is “by no means perfect, and fact-checkers have no doubt erred in some percentage of their labels.”

He called the change at Meta “a choice of politics, not policy,” and warned: “Depending on how this is applied, the consequences of this decision will be an increase in harassment, hate speech and other harmful behavior across billion-user platforms.”

Contributing: The Associated Press and Sam Campbell, KIRO Newsradio