WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - Meta has announced that it is ending its third party fact-checking program and moving to a Community Notes model on its social media platforms.
The technology giant said in an announcement Tuesday that it is doing away with third party fact-checking program as it wants to fix increasingly complex systems developed to manage content across its platforms, and to return to the fundamental commitment made by Mark Zuckerberg to free expression.
'This approach has gone too far. Many of these efforts have expanded over time to the point where we are making too many mistakes, frustrating our users and too often getting in the way of the free expression we set out to enable. Too much harmless content gets censored, too many people find themselves wrongly locked up in 'Facebook jail,' and we are often too slow to respond when they do,' said Joel Kaplan, Meta Chief Global Affairs Officer.
'We will allow more speech by lifting restrictions on some topics that are part of mainstream discourse and focusing our enforcement on illegal and high-severity violations. We will take a more personalized approach to political content, so that people who want to see more of it in their feeds can.'
Once the program is up and running, Meta won't write Community Notes or decide which ones show up. They are written and rated by contributing users. Just like they do on X, Community Notes will require agreement between people with a range of perspectives to help prevent biased ratings.
Meta said it intends to be transparent about how different viewpoints inform the Notes displayed in its apps, and are working on the right way to share this information.
The company plans to phase in Community Notes in the U.S. first over the next couple of months, and will continue to improve it over the course of the year. 'As we make the transition, we will get rid of our fact-checking control, stop demoting fact checked content and, instead of overlaying full screen interstitial warnings you have to click through before you can even see the post, we will use a much less obtrusive label indicating that there is additional information for those who want to see it'.
Meta admitted that it has been 'over-enforcing' rules, limiting legitimate political debate and censoring too much trivial content and subjecting too many people to frustrating enforcement actions.
Citing an example, Meta said that in December, millions of pieces of content were removed from its social media platforms every day. 'While these actions account for less than 1% of content produced every day, we think one to two out of every 10 of these actions may have been mistakes.'
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