Facebook & Instagram Remove Fact Checkers

Uploaded on 2025-01-08 in TECHNOLOGY-Key Areas-Social Media, NEWS-Cybersecurity News, FREE TO VIEW

Meta will remove third-party fact checkers from its Facebook and Instagram social media platform as they say they want to embrace free speech. They intend to replace fact checkers with the accuracy of message being monitored by user-generated community notes.

Meta's current fact checking programme, introduced in 2016, refers posts that appear to be false or misleading to independent organisations to assess their credibility.

In a recent video Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s Chief Executive, said third-party moderators were "too politically biased" and it was "time to get back to our roots around free expression".

He said that removing some restrictions on content on topics such as gender and immigration would “make sure that people can share their beliefs and experiences on our platforms”. According to Zuckerberg, the focus of filters that scan posts for policy violations would be shifted to only tackling illegal and high severity violations with Meta, relying on users to report lower severity violations before it takes action.

“By dialling them back, we’re going to dramatically reduce the amount of censorship on our platforms,” he said.
“We’re also going to tune our content filters to require much higher confidence before taking down content. The reality is that this is a tradeoff. It means we’re going to catch less bad stuff, but we’ll also reduce innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally take down.”

This move coincides with Elon Musk and other notable technology business leaders scrambling to improve relations with US President-elect Donald Trump before he takes office later in January.

Following the recent exit of ex-British Deputy Prime Minster, Nick Clegg, Meta's the new Global Affairs Chief, Joel Kaplan, wrote that the company's reliance on independent moderators was "well-intentioned" but had too often resulted in censoring.

Donald Trump's Republican party allies have criticised Meta for its fact-checking policy, calling it censorship of right-wing voices. Trump said at a news conference, after these changes were announced, that he was impressed and that Meta had "come a long way".

This is in marked contrast to Chines-owned TikTok platform which faces on imminent ban in the US, where is has 170 million users, unless it finds new ownership.

Meta's current fact checking policy is to refers post that appear to be false or misleading to independent organisations to assess their credibility. Posts flagged as inaccurate can have labels attached to them offering viewers more information, and be moved lower in users' feeds. That will now be replaced "in the US first" by community notes.

The new community notes system has been copied from X, which introduced it after being bought and renamed by Elon Musk. Meta also plans to adjust its automated systems that scan for policy violations, which it says have resulted in “too much content being censored that shouldn’t have been.”

The systems will now be focused on checking only for illegal and “high-severity” violations such as terrorism, child sexual exploitation, drugs, fraud and scams. Other concerns will have to be reported by users before the company evaluates them. The company is also getting rid of content restrictions on certain topics, such as immigration and gender identity, and rolling back limits on how much politics-related content users see in their feeds.

In 2023, the NGO Human Right Watch released a report accusing Meta of “silencing voices in support of Palestine and Palestinian human rights”. The group said it documented more than 1,000 takedowns of posts that were “unduly suppressed” on Meta platforms between October and November of that year.

Meta says it has "no immediate plans" to get rid of its third-party fact checkers in the UK or the EU.

With the enforcement of Online Harms legislation in Britain and the heightened focus on social media in the UK and EU countries following recent inflammatory comments made by Elon Musk on X, it seems likely that Meta's content policies in the US and overseas will diverge.

Image: Ideogram

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