Mark Zuckerberg says social media platforms Facebook and Instagram are going to “get back to our roots” by removing fact checkers and replacing them with a “Community Notes” system modelled after the one used by Elon Musk’s X.
Facebook has implemented a variety of “complex systems” over the years to address the spread of harmful material online, Zuckerberg said in a video message, but those systems sometimes make mistakes—and it’s now reached a point where “it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship.” He also believes the recent election of Donald Trump as president of the US represents “a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing free speech,” which he said has been under fire in recent years from governments and “legacy media.”
“We’re going to get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with Community Notes, similar to X, starting in the US,” Zuckerberg said. “After Trump first got elected in 2016, the legacy media wrote nonstop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy. We tried in good faith to address those concerns without becoming the arbiters of truth. But the fact-checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they created, especially in the US.”
Facebook and Instagram will also simplify their content policies to “get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse,” and that have “increasingly been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas.” Enforcement policies will be changed to focus on “illegal and high-severity violations,” while “lower-severity violations” will require complaints before any action is taken. Zuckerberg acknowledged that the change means Facebook and Instagram will “catch less bad stuff,” but said reducing the number of improper takedowns is a greater priority.
I don’t think anyone would claim that Facebook’s content moderation policies have been particularly great (or even effective) until now, but following in the footsteps of X is an unexpected choice. The platform originally known as Twitter has descended into near-complete chaos and uselessness since Elon Musk’s takeover, which among other things saw the elimination of content moderators and its Trust and Safety team.
The net result of that farcical commitment to free speech, as PC Gamer’s Joshua Wolens put it so eloquently, is that using the platform has “become dank and ichorous, like wading through the sheer, concentrated sludge of all the worst comment sections on the internet. Scam after scam after scam after AI video after crypto pump-and-dump. A pure, unmitigated firehose of slop, not suitable for human life.”
Bizarrely, Meta’s trust and safety and content moderation teams will be moved out of California and into Texas, where Zuckerberg said there will be “less concern about the bias of our teams.” That too may be inspired by X, which moved its own headquarters from California to Texas in September 2024 and a month later changed its terms of service to direct disputes to the US District Court for the Northern District of Texas—a “favored destination for conservative activists and business groups,” according to The Guardian—even though X itself is actually headquartered in the Western District.
Musk reacted to Zuckerberg’s with a brief message posted to X: “This is cool.” X CEO Linda Yaccarino also expressed support for the change, writing, “Fact-checking and moderation doesn’t belong in the hands of a few select gatekeepers who can easily inject their bias into decisions. It’s a democratic process that belongs in the hands of many. And as we’ve seen on X since Community Notes debuted, it’s profoundly successful while keeping freedom of speech sacred.”
(Image credit: Linda Yaccarino (Twitter))
Zuckerberg’s supplication in the face of Trump’s promise to punish his perceived enemies isn’t subtle, but neither is it surprising: Companies and CEOs including Meta, Amazon, Apple CEO Tim Cook, and OpenAI chief Sam Altman, have donated millions of dollars to Trump’s inauguration fund, a bit of ritualized self-debasement described by NPR as “kissing the ring.”
Still, just in case it might go missed, Zuckerberg also worked in a little MAGA-themed commentary on Meta’s planned approach to regulation of its platforms outside the US.
“We’re going to work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world that are going after American companies and pushing to censor more,” Zuckerberg said. “The US has the strongest constitutional protections for free expression in the world. Europe has an ever-increasing number of laws institutionalizing censorship and making it difficult to build anything innovative there. Latin American countries have secret courts that can order companies to quietly take things down. China has censored our apps from even working in the country.
“The only way that we can push back on this global trend is with the support of the US government. And that’s why it’s been so difficult over the past four years, when even the US government has pushed for censorship. By going after us and other American companies, it has emboldened other governments to go even further. But now we have the opportunity to restore free expression, and I am excited to take it.”
Meta’s content moderation cutback—because that’s what this is—seems particularly ironic (and galling) when compared to efforts to improve moderation systems and reduce toxicity in the videogame realm. Riot Games, for instance, recently instituted a policy of holding Valorant and League of Legends players responsible for “off-platform” conduct; more notably, US senators have warned Valve that it may face “more intense scrutiny” from the government if it doesn’t do something about the proliferation of extremist content on Steam. Yet Facebook, which is already not great in terms of spreading disinformation and toxicity, wants to be more like X, which is an absolute sewer, and that’s apparently just fine.
The new Community Notes features on Facebook and Instagram will be phased in over the next couple months, beginning in the US.
