Meta Overhauls Content Moderation, Eliminates Fact-Checkers for Community Notes

Meta announced a major overhaul of its content moderation policies on Tuesday, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealing plans to eliminate third-party fact-checkers in favor of user-generated “community notes” across Facebook and Instagram, similar to the system used on X.

“Fact checkers have been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created,” Zuckerberg said in a video announcement. “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.”

The sweeping changes come as President-elect Donald Trump prepares to take office. The announcement follows Meta’s recent appointment of Trump ally and UFC CEO Dana White to its board of directors and the company’s pledge to donate $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund.

Joel Kaplan, Meta’s newly appointed Chief of Global Affairs, told Fox that while fact-checking partnerships were “well-intentioned at the outset,” they suffered from “too much political bias.” Kaplan acknowledged the timing of the announcement is directly related to the incoming administration, noting the opportunity presented by a new president who champions free expression.

Under the new policy, Meta will adjust its automated systems to focus primarily on illegal and “high-severity” violations such as terrorism, child exploitation, drugs, fraud, and scams. The company is also relocating its trust and safety teams from California to Texas and other U.S. locations to address concerns about bias.

Zuckerberg acknowledged these changes involve tradeoffs: “It means that 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.”

The Real Facebook Oversight Board, an outside accountability group, criticized the move as “political pandering” and a “retreat from any sane and safe approach to content moderation.”

The policy shift represents a dramatic reversal from Meta’s 2016 implementation of independent fact-checking following concerns about foreign interference and disinformation. The company will begin rolling out these changes in the United States across Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, following a similar path to Elon Musk’s X platform, which replaced fact-checkers with community notes in 2022.

Meta also plans to ease content restrictions on topics such as immigration and gender identity, while reducing limits on politics-related content in users’ feeds, marking a significant departure from its previous moderation approach.


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