Meta ends third-party fact-checking scheme as it prepares for Trump return

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Facebook owner Meta is ending its third-party fact-checking program and instead relying on its users to flag misinformation as the social media giant prepares for Donald Trump to become president.

The $1.59 trillion company said Tuesday it would “allow for more speech by removing restrictions on certain topics that are part of the mainstream conversation and focusing our enforcement on illegal and high-severity violations” and “taking a more personalized approach to political content.” :

“It’s time to get back to our roots of free expression on Facebook and Instagram,” Meta CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg said in a video message.

During last year’s US presidential election campaign, President-elect Trump sharply criticized Zuckerberg, suggesting that if: Meta: interfered in the 2024 vote, he will “spend the rest of his life in prison.”

But the founder of Facebook has sought to restore relations with Trump after his victory in November, including visiting him at his residence in Mar-a-Lago, Florida.

On Monday, Metta took a swipe at the incoming US presidential administration, naming UFC founder and well-known supporter Donald Trump. Dana White to its board of directors.

Zuckerberg said the complexity of his content moderation system, which was expanded in December 2016 after Trump’s first election victory, introduced “too many mistakes and too much censorship.”

Starting in the US, Meta will move to a so-called “community posts” model similar to that used by Elon Musk X, which allows users to add context to controversial or misleading posts. Meta will not write community posts itself.

Zuckerberg added that Meta will also change its systems to “drastically reduce” the amount of content its automated filters remove from its platform, including removing restrictions on topics such as immigration and gender.

He acknowledged that the changes would mean Meta would “catch less bad stuff” but argued that the trade-off was worth reducing the number of posts from “innocent people” that were taken down.

The changes bring Zuckerberg closer Muskwho reduced content moderation after buying the social media platform, then called Twitter, in 2022.

“As they do in X, community notes will require consensus among people with a range of perspectives to help prevent biased rankings,” Meta said in a blog post.

Prominent Republican Joel Kaplan, who Meta announced last week that he was taking over from Sir Nick Clegg as its global affairs chairman, told Fox News on Tuesday that his third-party fact-checkers were “extremely biased”.

Referring to Trump’s return to the White House on January 20, Kaplan added: difference”.