Meta ends ‘politically biased’ factchecking

(MENAFN) Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Threads, revealed on Tuesday that it would end its third-party fact-checking program in the US. CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted that the program had become "too politically biased" and "destroyed more trust than it created." He acknowledged that what started as an inclusive initiative had increasingly been used to silence differing opinions.

In its place, Meta will implement a “Community Notes” system, enabling users to flag posts as potentially misleading for additional context, similar to the system employed by Elon Musk's platform X (formerly Twitter). The company will also remove restrictions on topics such as immigration and gender identity.

Zuckerberg explained that recent political developments, including the election of Donald Trump, influenced the decision. He promised to reduce censorship and emphasized that the company's content moderation had gone too far, creating user frustration. Joel Kaplan, Meta's new Chief Global Affairs Officer, pointed out that biases among independent fact-checkers contributed to the program's failure, turning it into a tool for censorship rather than information sharing.

The new Community Notes system will be gradually rolled out across the US, with improvements planned for later in the year. Meta will also discontinue demoting fact-checked content, replacing it with labels notifying users of additional context. The company's third-party fact-checking program, launched in 2016, faced criticism over bias, transparency issues, and accusations of disproportionately targeting conservative voices.

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