Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced that his company will put freedom of speech at the heart of its mission going forward. The multi-headed approach means that posts on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads will be subject to less external scrutiny, with Meta relying on the community to moderate.
Facebook is killing its fact-checking program
In both an official press release and a series of posts on the Threads (embedded below), Mark Zuckerberg announced Meta’s plans to kill its fact-checking program. Community Notes will replace third-party fact-checkers, with Meta/Facebook believing that social media communities are capable of change.
Meta’s community notes will work similarly to Notes from the X community. So, rather than third-party fact-checkers deciding what is and isn’t appropriate (and deleting posts accordingly), the community responds to claims and opinions, offering counter-claims or calling out misinformation. Community notes will be implemented in the coming months, starting from the United States.
While the move from fact-checkers to Community Notes is at the heart of this policy change, there’s more to it. Zuckerberg wants to simplify Meta’s content policies, putting more onus on “addressing illegal and high-gravity violations, such as terrorism, child sexual exploitation, drugs, fraud and scams.”
Other changes include reinstating civic content, so you can see more posts about politics and social issues on your Facebook feed, moving the remaining content moderators from California to Texas (to counter allegations of bias ), and work with President Trump to “push.” back against foreign governments looking to American companies to censor more.”
Policies that reflect the politics of the day
Whether you consider this a change for the better or worse probably depends on your personal politics. However, not only copying the policies of Elon Musk in X, but mentioning President Trump in his posts Threads, Zuckerberg made it clear that these changes were inspired by the current political situation in the United States.
I have enough dropped X for Bluesky at this point because of the speech level on the first. So, I’ll have to see what impact these changes have on Facebook, and to a lesser extent, Instagram and Threads, before deciding whether to stay on Meta’s social media platforms.
The key is to allow people to express themselves freely (which is a good thing) without letting the platform(s) devolve into a series of arguments and insults (which is a bad thing). And that will be a difficult balancing act to do.
