Meta has a new goal: more freedom of speech and fewer topic restrictions
8 January 09:42
Meta will get rid of fact-checkers on Facebook and Instagram – instead, the company will rely on users to report fakes and misleading information. This was announced by Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, whose statement was disseminated by the Associated Press and many other foreign media, "Komersant Ukrainian" reports.
Starting with the United States, Meta will end its fact-checking program with the help of independent third parties. The company said it decided to end the program because the fact-checkers had their own biases and too much content ended up being fact-checked. Meta acknowledged that its approach to building complex systems to manage content on its platforms had “gone too far” and made “too many mistakes” by censoring too much content.
The company expects its users to report false stories and misleading information through a “Community Notes” system similar to that used by X/Twitter.
The company believes that this will also allow people to share more types of political content, including posts on hot topics.
As you know, since 2021, Meta has been working to reduce the amount of political content that appears in users’ feeds. Now, Meta has called this a “pretty rough approach” and said it will start bringing this content back to Facebook and Instagram.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged that the changes are partly due to political events, particularly Donald Trump’s victory in the presidential election.
“The recent election also seems to be a cultural tipping point for putting words back in front of people,” Zuckerberg said in an online video.
Meta’s supervisory board, which was set up to act as an arbiter of controversial content decisions, said it welcomed the changes and looked forward to working with the company to “better understand the changes.”
