Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Tuesday that the company is getting rid of its “fact-checkers” and moving to a Community Notes model to “restore free expression” across Facebook, Instagram and other Meta platforms.
Zuckerberg said “governments and legacy media have pushed to censor more and more,” and the recent elections “feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech.”
“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 posted 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.”
Zuckerberg said Meta’s “independent fact checking program,” launched in 2016, started out with the best of intentions, but ended up being a tool for censoring “legitimate political speech and debate.”
During an appearance on Fox News’ “Fox & Friends” Tuesday morning, Meta’s chief global affairs officer, Joel Kaplan, said the company was aiming to “reset the balance in favor of free expression.”
“We went to independent, third-party fact-checkers,” Kaplan told Fox News Digital in an interview. “It has become clear there is too much political bias in what they choose to fact-check because, basically, they get to fact-check whatever they see on the platform.”
Kaplan said the “Community Notes” model is a better approach.
“Instead of going to some so-called expert, it instead relies on the community and the people on the platform to provide their own commentary to something that they’ve read,” Kaplan explained, noting that if a note gets support from “the broadest cross-section of users,” that note can be attached to the content for others to see.
“We think that’s a much better approach rather than relying on so-called experts who bring their own biases into the program,” Kaplan said.
Kaplan said the automated systems Meta currently uses also make “too many mistakes,” removing content “that doesn’t even violate our standards.”
He noted that Meta will continue to moderate posts related to illegal content like terrorism, illegal drugs and child sexual exploitation.
“We have a new administration coming in that is far from pressuring companies to censor and [is more] a huge supporter of free expression,” Kaplan said, referring to the incoming Trump administration. “It gets us back to the values that Mark founded the company on.”
“We want to make sure that discourse can happen freely on the platform without fear of censorship,” Kaplan added. “We have the power to change the rules and make them more supportive of free expression. And we’re not just changing the rules, we are actually changing how we enforce the rules.”
Conservatives applauded the move as a “game changer” for online discourse.
“A total game changer for free speech,” said Republican strategist Andrew Suburban in a post on X. “The Facebook/Instagram fact checking program was the beating heart of the censorship industrial complex.”
George Washington University Law Professor Jonathan Turley said “this is an important moment,” during an interview with Ainsley Earhardt on Fox. “Zuckerberg will be a powerful ally. It would be a wonderful change.”
He noted that for a long time, Elon Musk had faced the “slings and arrows” of the government-media censorship complex by himself and didn’t excuse Zuckerberg for his complicity in the Biden regime’s censorship efforts.
“We all love a redemptive sinner, except it would be great if that had occurred before you were caught,” Turley said. “And we have a great deal of information now that does not really support the argument by Zuckerberg that they were unwilling partners forced into this by the Biden administration,” he added. “They resisted calls from many of us for years to join Elon Musk, to reveal the Facebook files, which they resisted.”
Turley argued that Meta fought transparency “at every stage and it finally collapsed.”
Not everyone was pleased with Meta’s move toward free expression.
CNN’s Brian Stelter complained in an oped that Zuck’s “sweeping changes” will have “more permissive rules for posting conservative opinions” and fall in line with “the desires of President-elect Donald Trump and his supporters.”
Stelter called Zuckerberg’s claim that “governments and legacy media have pushed to censor” a “right-wing talking point used to undermine fact checking” and fretted that the changes will reshape “whole swaths of the internet in MAGA-friendly ways.”
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