‘Too much censorship’: Mark Zuckerberg announces Meta will end fact-checking on Facebook, Instagram

Mark Zuckerberg has announced Meta will make a major change on Facebook and Instagram to “restore free expression” and end “censorship”.

Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has announced that the social media behemoth will end its fact-checking program on Facebook and Instagram to “restore free expression”, conceding that content moderation policies had “gone too far” and resulted in “too many mistakes and too much censorship”.

In a video on Tuesday announcing the change, Mr Zuckerberg said Meta would replace its third-party fact checkers — first introduced in 2016 after the election of Donald Trump — with crowdsourced “community notes”, similar to Elon Musk’s X.

“It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression on Facebook and Instagram,” Mr Zuckerberg said.

“There’s been widespread debate about potential harms from online content. Governments and legacy media have pushed to censor more and more. A lot of this is clearly political. But there’s also a lot of legitimately bad stuff out there — drugs, terrorism, child exploitation.”

Mr Zuckerberg said those were “things that we take very seriously and I want to make sure that we handle responsibly”.

Mark Zuckerberg said Meta was ‘restoring free expression’. Picture: X

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“So we built a lot of complex systems to moderate content,” he said.

“But the problem with complex systems is they make mistakes. Even if they accidentally censor just 1 per cent of posts, that is millions of people. And we’ve reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship.”

He said the recent elections in the US “also feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritising speech”.

“So we’re going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies and restoring free expression on our platforms,” he said.

“More specifically, we’re going to get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with Community Notes similar to X, starting in the US.”

After the 2016 elections, Mr Zuckerberg said the “legacy media wrote non-stop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy”.

“We tried in good faith to address those concerns without becoming the arbiters of truth,” he said. “But the fact-checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they created, especially in the US.”

Donald Trump welcomed Meta’s move. Picture: Scott Olson/Getty Images/AFP

Mr Zuckerberg said the “more comprehensive” community note system would be phased in over the next few months.

Meta would also be “simplifying” its 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”, he added.

“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 said.

Mr Zuckerberg said Meta would refocus its content filters to focus only on tackling “illegal and high severity violations”.

Algorithms will also be changed to once again allow users to see more “civic content”.

“For a while, the community asked to see less politics because it was making people stressed, so we stopped recommending those posts,” he said.

“But it feels like we’re in a new era now, and we’re getting feedback that people want to see this content again.”

President-elect Trump said the abrupt policy shift was “probably” motivated by his threats against Mr Zuckerberg.

Speaking to reporters at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, Mr Trump expressed satisfaction with Meta’s move, and when asked if he believed it was a response to his “threats” against Mr Zuckerberg, responded, “Probably, yeah.”

In August, Mr Trump claimed in a book that Mr Zuckerberg had interfered in the 2020 election and that he would “spend the rest of his life in prison” if he attempted to interfere in 2024.

He later softened his position, telling a podcast in October that he liked the Meta CEO “much better now” that he was “staying out of the election”, adding that Mr Zuckerberg had called him after he was shot in July “which was nice”.

Mr Zuckerberg said fact-checkers were too politically ‘biased’. Picture: Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images

Meta’s chief global affairs officer, Joel Kaplan, told Fox News on Tuesday that it was a “great opportunity for us to reset the balance in favour of free expression”.

“We went to independent, third-party fact-checkers,” Mr Kaplan said.

“It has become clear there is too much political bias in what they choose to fact-check because, basically, they get to fact-check whatever they see on the platform.”

Mr Kaplan said Meta was “ending that completely” in favour of community notes.

“Instead of going to some so-called expert, it instead relies on the community and the people on the platform to provide their own commentary to something that they’ve read,” he said.

If a note gets support from the “broadest cross-section of users”, that note can be attached to the content for others to see.

“We think that’s a much better approach rather than relying on so-called experts who bring their own biases into the program,” Mr Kaplan said.

He said the election of Mr Trump presented a “real opportunity now”.

“We have a new administration coming in that is far from pressuring companies to censor and [is more] a huge supporter of free expression,” Mr Kaplan said.

“It gets us back to the values that Mark founded the company on.”

The shift comes after Mr Zuckerberg last year sent a letter to the House Judiciary Committee in which he admitted that he felt pressure from the Biden administration, particularly with regard to Covid content, and even items like satire and humour.

“The thing is, as American companies, when other governments around the world that don’t have our tradition or our First Amendment, when they see the United States government pressuring US companies to take down content, it is just open season then for those governments to put more pressure [on their companies],” Mr Kaplan said.

“We do think it is a real opportunity to work with the Trump administration and to work on free expression at home.”

— with Fox News

Originally published as ‘Too much censorship’: Mark Zuckerberg announces Meta will end fact-checking on Facebook, Instagram