Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and other social media apps, announced Tuesday that it is eliminating its fact-check team. Instead, Meta said it will move toward a "Community Notes" model similar to what has been established on X.
Meta said its goal is to uphold its "fundamental commitment to free expression."
Meta says by using community notes, it will empower users to "decide when posts are potentially misleading and need more context." Meta says it intends to eliminate bias in its fact-checking methods.
"Experts, like everyone else, have their own biases and perspectives. This showed up in the choices some made about what to fact-check and how. Over time we ended up with too much content being fact-checked that people would understand to be legitimate political speech and debate," wrote Joel Kaplan, Facebook's chief global affairs officer. "Our system then attached real consequences in the form of intrusive labels and reduced distribution. A program intended to inform too often became a tool to censor."
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The company added that "too much harmless content" is censored and wrongly places users in "Facebook jail."
The announcement comes a day after Meta announced that it added three people to its board of directors, most notably UFC President Dana White. White has held a close allyship with President-elect Donald Trump, who is set to take office on Jan. 20.
Meta talked about the role of politics in the decision.
"We’re getting rid of a number of restrictions on topics like immigration, gender identity and gender that are the subject of frequent political discourse and debate. It’s not right that things can be said on TV or the floor of Congress, but not on our platforms. These policy changes may take a few weeks to be fully implemented," Kaplan said.
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Social media outlets have come under criticism for allowing misinformation to fester, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. Recent studies also show that habitual users of social media are more likely to spread false information.
