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Meta, on Tuesday, announced a significant change to its content moderation strategy by eliminating its third-party fact-checking program.
The company aims to enhance free expression and will implement a “Community Notes” model, akin to the system currently in use on Elon Musk’s platform, X.
With this new approach, posts across Meta’s platforms will be contextualised by contributions from users who will write and rate the Community Notes. This feature is expected to roll out in the U.S. over the coming months.
The decision marks Meta’s effort to improve its relationship with Republican President-elect Donald Trump ahead of his upcoming administration.
“We’ve reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes, and too much censorship,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Tuesday in a video announcement.
“The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech, so we’re going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our polices and restoring free expression on our platforms.”
Zuckerberg said the third-party fact-checkers have been “too politically biased” and have “destroyed more trust than they’ve created, especially in the U.S.”
Meta plans to simplify its content policies by lifting restrictions on sensitive topics such as immigration and gender, and it will focus its enforcement efforts on serious and illegal violations. In a strategic move, the company will relocate its trust and safety and content moderation teams from California, a state known for its Democratic leanings, to Texas, which tends to lean Republican.
“We’re going to work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world that are going after American companies and pushing to censor more,” Zuckerberg said.
Joel Kaplan, Meta’s head of global policy, appeared on “Fox and Friends” Tuesday and said Meta thinks the Community Notes system on Musk’s platform X has been working “really well.” Musk, who has been a vocal advocate for Trump online and donated millions of dollars to his campaign, has been in close contact with the president-elect since the election.
Last week, Meta said that Kaplan would become the company’s top policy officer, replacing Nick Clegg, who was a former British deputy prime minister and a leader of Britain’s centrist Liberal Democrats party.
Kaplan, who has held several policy related positions at Meta since joining the company in 2011 when it was still named Facebook, is well-known within the Republican party. He was a White House deputy chief of staff under former President George W. Bush and also once worked as a law clerk for former Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.
In December, Kaplan revealed in a Facebook post that he joined Vice-President Elect JD Vance and Trump during their recent visit at the New York Stock Exchange.
“We want to make it so that, bottom line, if you can say it on TV, you say it on the floor of Congress, you certainly ought to be able to say it on Facebook and Instagram without fear of censorship,” Kaplan said Tuesday.
Prominent Republican lawmakers have previously criticized Meta and other technology companies for allegations regarding the censorship of conservative voices on their respective platforms. For instance, House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, subpoenaed Zuckerberg and other tech CEOs in 2023 as part of a probe to “understand how and to what extent the Executive Branch coerced and colluded with companies and other intermediaries to censor speech.”
Zuckerberg has had a rocky relationship with Trump over the years, with the president-elect more recently describing Facebook as an “enemy of the people” in a March interview with CNBC.
Meta levied a two-year suspension on Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts in 2021 shortly after the company determined that the former president’s actions following the Jan. 6 insurrection in Washington, D.C., could potentially incite more violence.
In 2023, Trump was able to regain access to his Facebook and Instagram accounts, but he also faced some restrictions and potential penalties if he were to violate the company’s community guidelines. Meta eventually removed Trump’s account-related restrictions in July during the lead up to the 2024 U.S. presidential election.
