Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to replace Facebook fact checkers with user-driven 'community notes'

By Jon Brown, Christian Post Reporter Wednesday, January 08, 2025

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Tuesday that Facebook and Instagram will be doing away with their fact-checking algorithms in favor of user-driven "community notes" like those used on X, formerly known as Twitter.

Claiming "recent elections" indicated "a cultural tipping point towards, once again, prioritizing speech," Zuckerberg laid out other steps the tech giant will take to loosen clampdowns on speech, such as lifting restrictions on controversial cultural topics and allowing users to have more political content in their feeds.

Shortly after Donald Trump's first election in 2016, Meta began its third-party fact checks in a supposed effort to combat "misinformation," with the aid of more than 100 organizations in over 60 languages.

Get Our Latest News for FREE

Subscribe to get daily/weekly email with the top stories (plus special offers!) from The Christian Post. Be the first to know.

Subscribe

???? BREAKING: Mark Zuckerberg announces sweeping changes to Facebook and Instagram to move toward Free Speech including:

-Ending Third-Party Fact Checking and Replacing it with Community Notes like ????
-Removing Reduction of Political Content
-Lifting Topic Restrictions pic.twitter.com/9Y2DVQSrpk

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) January 7, 2025

"We're going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies and restoring free expression on our platforms," Zuckerberg said in a video. "More specifically, here's what we're going to do. First, we're going to get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with community notes similar to X, starting in the U.S."

"Fact-checkers have been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created," Zuckerberg further noted. "What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas, and it's gone too far."

Zuckerberg conceded that the new policy will permit more harmful content to exist on Meta's platforms, which he characterized as a "trade off." Meta will instead focus enforcement on illegal and high-severity violations, according to its website.

"We're also going to tune our content filters to require much higher confidence before taking down content," he said. "The reality is that this is a trade off. It means we're going to catch less bad stuff, but we'll also reduce the number of innocent people's posts and accounts that we accidentally take down."

Zuckerberg blamed "governments and legacy media" for driving the push "to censor more and more," and singled out the Biden administration for exhibiting such tactics, which he claimed has "emboldened other governments to go even further."

In a letter to the House Judiciary Committee last August, Zuckerberg admitted that the Biden administration pressured his company to effectively "censor" Facebook content related to COVID-19 and Hunter Biden's laptop.

Zuckerberg alleged at the time that senior officials in the Biden administration badgered the social media giant "to censor certain posts about COVID-19, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn't agree."

Zuckerberg's Tuesday announcement comes after he dined with President-elect Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago last month in Palm Beach, Florida. Trump had been banned from Facebook and Twitter while he was still president in 2021, but Meta is one of several tech companies that appear to be angling to get into Trump's good graces.

Both Meta and Amazon donated $1 million to Trump's inauguration fund last month, according to The Associated Press.

During a 90-minute press conference at Mar-a-Lago on Tuesday, President-elect Donald Trump touched briefly on the topic of Meta's new content moderation policy, saying it was "probably" thanks to him.