Facebook, Instagram, and Threads are ditching third-party fact-checkers in favor of a Community Notes program inspired by X, according to an announcement penned by Meta’s new Trump-friendly policy chief Joe Kaplan. Meta is also moving its trust and safety teams from California to Texas.
“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.” Meta said. “We think this could be a better way of achieving our original intention of providing people with information about what they’re seeing – and one that’s less prone to bias.”
The Community Notes feature will first be rolled out in the US “over the next couple of months” according to Meta, and will display an unobtrusive label indicating that there is additional information available on a post in place of full-screen warnings that users have to click through. Like the X feature, Meta says its own Community Notes will “require agreement between people with a range of perspectives to help prevent biased ratings.”
The moderation changes aim to address complaints that Meta censors “too much harmless content” on its platforms, and is slow to respond to users who have their accounts restricted. Meta is also moving its trust and safety teams responsible for its content policies and content reviews content out of California to Texas and other US locations, instead of wholesale moving its California headquarters like Elon Musk did with SpaceX and X.
Meta says it’s also scrapping a number of current restrictions around topics like immigration and gender identity, and will start phasing political content back into users’ feeds on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads “with a more personalized approach.”
Meta will still utilize automated moderation systems, but says these will now largely focus on tackling more severe policy violations like terrorism, child sexual exploitation, drugs, fraud, and scams. Less severe policy violations will now need to be detected and reported by community members before Meta takes any action against them. Most of Meta’s systems for automatically predicting which posts may violate Meta’s policies and demoting such content are also being scrapped.
“These changes are an attempt to return to the commitment to free expression that Mark Zuckerberg set out in his Georgetown speech,” Meta said. “That means being vigilant about the impact our policies and systems are having on people’s ability to make their voices heard, and having the humility to change our approach when we know we’re getting things wrong.”