Meta on Tuesday said it was canceling its third-party fact checking program, signaling a major shift in how the parent company of Facebook and Instagram patrols content on its platforms.
“We’re going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies and restoring free expression on our platforms,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a video posted on Tuesday morning. “More specifically, we’re going to get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with Community Notes similar to X, starting in the U.S.”
Meta launched its fact checking program soon after the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election. The company used ABC News, AP, Politifact, Snopes and FactCheck.org to flag content on its platforms, and posts that were deemed unreliable were pushed further down in Facebook’s news feed; users were also warned before sharing flagged content that they were posting “disputed” stories.
Zuckerberg, in his video on Tuesday, said the company tried its best to be accurate with its fact checks, but incorrectly flagging even 1% of content on its platforms still negatively affected millions of users.
“We’ve reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship,” he said.
The Meta boss also pointed to recent elections, like Donald Trump’s victory over Kamala Harris in November, as a “cultural tipping point” that made “prioritizing free speech” vital.
Zuckerberg said that, following the 2016 election, the legacy media “wrote nonstop” about how misinformation was a threat to democracy. But the fact checkers, he said, have been “too politically biased” and “destroyed” the public’s faith they’re simply calling balls and strikes.
Meta’s new Community Notes-style program will be implemented over the next few months, Zuckerberg noted. He added that the company would be easing up on censoring content tied to hot button topics like “immigration and gender” moving forward.
“What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different opinions,” Zuckerberg said. “And it’s gone too far.”
The update came a day after UFC CEO and president Dana White, Exor CEO John Elkann and tech investor Charlie Songhurst were elected to join Meta’s board of directors.
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