Facebook will take a leaf out of X’s book and ditch its fact-checking programme, as founder Mark Zuckerberg vowed to “restore free expression” on the platform.
In a video on the social network on Tuesday, Zuckerberg said its parent company Meta would “get rid of fact-checkers”, replacing them with “community notes, similar to X”, the platform owned by rival tech billionaire Elon Musk, who has been an outspoken critic of what he characterises as a creeping culture of “censorship”.
Zuckerberg said the move will “dramatically reduce the amount of censorship” on the sites he owns, recommending more political content on Meta’s platforms, including Facebook, Instagram and Threads.
X uses input from other users to provide caveats and further information to contentious and potentially misleading or false posts.
Zuckerberg told his 118 million Facebook followers that Meta’s fact-checkers “have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created”.
In the five-minute long clip, Zuckerberg also issued a pointed message to major new outlets saying: “Governments and legacy media have pushed to censor more and more”.
“We’ve reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship,” he added.
As part of the change-up, the tech firm’s content will be relocated from California to Texas, a state where “there is less concern about the bias of our teams”, Zuckerberg said.
Zuckerberg acknowledged that the changes are in part sparked by political events, including the election victory of Donald Trump, who will be inaugurated on January 20.
“The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritising speech,” he claimed.
The social media company also said it 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.
The dramatic u-turn in the company’s approach follows the departure of former deputy PM and Lib Dem leader Sir Nick Clegg as the company’s head of global affairs.
During his time at the tech giant, Sir Nick led on issues including content policy and elections as well as spearheading Meta’s independent content oversight board, as per Euro News.
The oversight board, which was set up to act as a referee on controversial content decisions, said it welcomed the changes and looked 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,” Associated Press reports.
Sir Nick’s replacement, former Republican Party operator Joel Kaplan, said in a blog post: “We’ve seen this approach work on X – where they empower their community to decide when posts are potentially misleading and need more context.
Kaplan said the new system will be phased in over the next couple of months, and the tech giant will work on improving it over the year.
As part of the transition, Meta will replace warnings overlaid on posts that it forces users to click through with labels, as per AP.