Meta, the company that owns Facebook and Instagram, announced on Tuesday that it is discontinuing its third-party fact-checking program and substituting it with a user-written Community Notes program, which is modeled after Elon Musk’s social media site X.
Meta will discontinue its independent third-party fact-checking program in the U.S. According to the firm, the program was terminated because too much content was fact-checked and professional fact-checkers had their own biases.
Rather, it will switch to a Community Notes approach that leverages user-generated fact-checking contributions.
In a blog post, Joel Kaplan, Chief Global Affairs Officer of Meta, stated, “We’ve seen this approach work on X, where they empower their community to decide when posts are potentially misleading and need more context.”
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, 2018–9. (Mark Lennihan/AP Photo, File)AP
In order to concentrate on unlawful and serious violations including terrorism, child sex exploitation, and drug use, the social media firm also announced that it intends to expand free expression by removing some limits on specific subjects that are covered in the media.
Meta claimed that by censoring too much content, its strategy of creating intricate mechanisms to control content on its platforms has gone too far and made too many blunders.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted that political developments, like as Donald Trump’s sweeping election victory, were a contributing factor in the modifications.
In an online video, Zuckerberg stated that the recent elections seemed like a cultural tipping moment toward putting expression first once more.
Established to serve as a referee on contentious decisions, Meta’s quasi-independent Oversight Board said it welcomed the changes and looked forward to collaborating with the company to fully comprehend them so that its new strategy could be as successful and speech-friendly as possible.
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