Mark Zuckerberg announced the end of Meta’s partnerships with third-party fact-checkers this week. Instead, the company—with Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp under its umbrella of products and services—will implement a “Community Notes” style system, like the one used by Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter), allowing users to provide context to “potentially” misleading posts.
The trigger behind the unexpected decision has now been revealed in a new report.
According to The Wall Street Journal, this decision was the result of Zuckerberg’s own personal experience with Facebook. In November 2023, the Meta CEO posted about a knee injury he sustained while training for an MMA fight.
To his surprise, the post did not get any significant traction. Meta’s algorithms had mistakenly demoted his post, limiting its reach, internal investigation revealed. At that time, Facebook was reportedly throttling all health-related content on the platform to minimise the spread of misinformation.
A company-wide review of Meta’s content moderation practices was initiated in the aftermath of the incident following which Zuckerberg sought to re-evaluate how the platform approached censorship, according to the report.
The result, announced on January 7, 2025, was a dramatic overhaul of Meta’s policies with the scrapping of its independent fact-checking program that has been in existence since 2016.
“We’ve reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship. It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression,” Zuckerberg explained in a video. “We’re going to focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies, and restoring free expression on our platforms.”
This move has drawn criticism from some Meta employees who fear it might cause increase in misinformation. However, others including Musk have praised the decision, viewing it as a necessary step to protect free speech online.
US president-elect Donald Trump also came out in support of the move, praising the changes and suggesting they might be a response to his previous critiques of the platform’s policies.
“I think they’ve come a long way, Meta,” Trump said during a press conference, only hours after Zuckerberg made the announcement.
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