In a video posted to his Facebook page on Tuesday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the platform is getting rid of its fact-checkers.
“It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression,” Zuckerberg wrote in the video’s caption. “We’re replacing fact-checkers with Community Notes, simplifying our policies and focusing on reducing mistakes. Looking forward to this next chapter.”
The company is also undoing changes that reduced the amount of political content in user feeds.
“Fact-checkers have been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created,” Zuckerberg said. “What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas, and it’s gone too far.”
He acknowledged the “tradeoff” of encouraging political posts while eliminating all fact-checkers. It’s a fight against censorship, but online, as Berin Szóka, President of TechFreedom, told Mashable last month, “Censorship is just content moderation that someone doesn’t like.”
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Many experts have noted the shift in how we speak about content moderation. As Free Press Senior Counsel and Director of Digital Justice and Civil Rights Nora Benavidez said in a press release posted after Zuckerberg’s announcement, “Content moderation has never been a tool to repress free speech; it is a principle that the platforms themselves developed to promote dialogue and protect truth for users.”
“While Zuckerberg characterized the platform giant’s new approach as a defence of free speech, its real intentions are twofold: Ditch the technology company’s responsibility to protect its many users and align the company more closely with an incoming president who’s a known enemy of accountability,” Benavidez said in the press release.
The Real Facebook Oversight Board, an outside group named after Meta’s Oversight Board, released a press release stating that this is a “retreat from any sane and safe approach to content moderation.”
“All who are concerned about a slide into techno authoritarianism should be deeply alarmed by this action, as Meta further degrades the integrity of its platforms,” Ben Wyskida of the Real Facebook Oversight Board wrote. “Just days ahead of the inauguration, Meta – like Twitter – is retooling to allow the Trump administration’s propaganda and obfuscations to flow unchecked.”
Wyskida and many others have compared Zuckerberg’s move to Elon Musk’s, who did the same at Twitter, now X, when he took over that platform. In return, misinformation flourished. The fear that this could happen on Meta’s platforms, too — where misinformation has fueled conspiracy theories, wars, acts of violence, and radicalization across the world — is far from unfounded.
