Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a series of major changes to the company's content moderation policies and practices on 7 January, citing a shifting political and social landscape with a desire to embrace free speech.

Zuckerberg said Meta will end its fact-checking program with third party partners and replace it with a community-driven system similar to X’s Community Notes.

Key takeaways

•    Starting in the US, Meta is ending its third party fact-checking program and moving to a Community Notes model.
•    Will allow more speech by lifting restrictions on some topics that are part of mainstream discourse and focusing its enforcement on illegal and high-severity violations.
•    Will take a more personalised approach to political content, so that people who want to see more of it in their feeds can.

Zuckerberg noted that in recent years Meta developed ‘increasingly complex systems’ to manage content across its platforms that was partly in response to ‘societal and political pressure to moderate content’. However, that approach has gone too far, he stated. 

“As well-intentioned as many of these efforts have been, they have expanded over time to the point where we are making too many mistakes, frustrating our users and too often getting in the way of the free expression we set out to enable. Too much harmless content gets censored, too many people find themselves wrongly locked up in 'Facebook jail', and we are often too slow to respond when they do. We want to fix that and return to that fundamental commitment to free expression. Today, we’re making some changes to stay true to that ideal,” he added. 

“We will end the current third party fact checking program in the United States and instead begin moving to a Community Notes program. We’ve seen this approach work on X – where they empower their community to decide when posts are potentially misleading and need more context, and people across a diverse range of perspectives decide what sort of context is helpful for other users to see.”

The Meta CEO added that this could be a better way of achieving its original intention of providing people with information about what they’re seeing – and “one that’s less prone to bias”.

The tech major plans to phase in Community Notes in the US first over the next couple of months, and will continue to improve it over the course of the year, said Zuckerberg.

Citing the recent US elections as a “cultural tipping point”, Zuckerberg said that Meta would also be taking a more personalised approach to political content. The platform plans to recommend more political content based on users’ personalised signals and will expand the options people have to control how much of this content they see.

Listen in to Zuckerberg’s full talk here:

 

 

 

 

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A post shared by Mark Zuckerberg (@zuck)