Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced a huge change coming to Facebook, Instagram and Threads – he hopes to restore free speech following concerns over the presidential election
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has revealed a major change coming to Meta’s social media platforms.
The Meta CEO announced there will be a shift in the company’s moderation policies on Tuesday. In a video online, Zuckerburg touched on the political landscape and said he hopes the changes will help encourage free speech.
Facebook, Instagram and Threads will swap out its fact-checking program with trusted partners, replacing it with a community-driven system. The new system could be liken to Community Notes on X. The founder explained the changes will also be mirrored on Instagram and Threads.
Zuckerberg said: “We’re gonna get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies and restoring free expression on our platforms. More specifically, here’s what we’re going to do. First, we’re going to get rid of fact checkers and replace them with community notes similar to X, starting in the US.”
He added: “The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards, once again, prioritising speech. So we’re gonna get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies and restoring free expression on our platforms.”
Meta is also moving its trust and safety teams responsible for content policies and moderation from California to Texas. “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,” the firm said. “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.”
Meta will also be scrapping a number of current restrictions around topics like immigration and gender identity. It said political content will be phased back into feeds with a “more personalized approach”.
The firm will still use automated moderation systems, but these will now only focus on more serious content violations such as terrorism, child sexual exploitation, and drugs.
Zuckerberg further explained: “We built a lot of complex systems to moderate content, but the problem with complex systems is they make mistakes. Even if they accidentally censor just 1% of posts, that’s millions of people, and we’ve reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship.”
He believes the move will restore “innocent” posts from members of the public who enjoy using the platform. “We’re also going to tune our content filters to require much higher confidence before taking down content,” he said. “The reality is that this is a trade off. It means we’re going to catch less bad stuff, but we’ll also reduce the number of innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally take down.”
