Facebook Will No Longer Fact-Check Your Dumb Posts

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced that his company will be putting free speech at the heart of its mission going forward. The multi-headed approach means that posts on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads will be subject to less outside scrutiny, with Meta relying on the community to moderate itself.

Facebook Is Killing Its Fact-Checking Program

In both an official press release and a series of posts on Threads (embedded below), Mark Zuckerberg has announced Meta's plans to kill its fact-checking program. Community Notes will replace the third-party fact-checkers, with Meta/Facebook believing that social media communities are capable of moderating themselves.

Meta's Community Notes will work in a similar way to X's Community Notes. So, rather than third-party fact-checkers deciding what is and isn't appropriate (and removing posts accordingly), the community will respond to claims and opinions, offering counter-claims or calling out misinformation. Community Notes will be phased in over the next couple of months, starting in the United States.

While the switch away from fact-checkers to Community Notes is at the heart of this change in policy, there's more to it too. Zuckerberg wants to simplify Meta's content policies, putting more onus on "tackling illegal and high-severity violations, like terrorism, child sexual exploitation, drugs, fraud and scams."

Other changes include:

• Reintegrating civic content, so you'll likely see more posts about politics and social issues on your Facebook feed.
• Moving the remaining content moderators from California to Texas (to counter allegations of bias).
• Working with President Trump to "push back against foreign governments going after American companies to censor more."

Policies That Reflect the Politics of the Day

Whether you consider this to be a change for the better or worse likely depends on your personal politics. However, by not only copying Elon Musk's policies at X but citing President Trump in his Threads posts, Zuckerberg has made it clear that these changes have been inspired by the current political situation in the US.

I have pretty much abandoned X for Bluesky at this point due to the level of discourse on the former. So, I'll have to see what impact these changes have on Facebook, and to a lesser extent, Instagram and Threads, before deciding whether to stick around on Meta's social media platforms.

The key is to allow people to express themselves freely (which is a good thing) without letting the platform(s) devolve into a series of arguments and insults (which is a bad thing). And that will be a difficult balancing act to pull off.