Facebook has announced it will end its use of third-party fact-checkers and will instead utilize a similar system to the Community Notes enacted by the X platform.
In a video published Tuesday, founder Mark Zuckerberg revealed the move, stating the platform will lift restrictions on certain topics, and will take a more personalized approach to political content.
“When we launched our independent fact-checking program in 2016, we were very clear that we didn’t want to be the arbiters of truth,” Facebook Chief Global Affairs Officer Joel Kaplan wrote in a blog post. “We made what we thought was the best and most reasonable choice at the time, which was to hand that responsibility over to independent fact checking organizations. The intention of the program was to have these independent experts give people more information about the things they see online, particularly viral hoaxes, so they were able to judge for themselves what they saw and read.
“That’s not the way things played out, especially in the United States. Experts, like everyone else, have their own biases and perspectives. This showed up in the choices some made about what to fact check and how. Over time we ended up with too much content being fact checked that people would understand to be legitimate political speech and debate. Our system then attached real consequences in the form of intrusive labels and reduced distribution. A program intended to inform too often became a tool to censor.
“We are now changing this approach. We will end the current third party fact checking program in the United States and instead begin moving to a Community Notes program. We’ve seen this approach work on X – where they empower their community to decide when posts are potentially misleading and need more context, and people across a diverse range of perspectives decide what sort of context is helpful for other users to see. We think this could be a better way of achieving our original intention of providing people with information about what they’re seeing – and one that’s less prone to bias.”
Facebook has been criticized — especially by prominent conservatives — for its fact-checking and content moderation policies in recent years.
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