Meta to end fact-checking program on Facebook, Instagram, shift to Community Notes 

In place of content moderation, the company said it will now move to a Community Note program, the same approach adopted and now popular with Elon Musk’s X.

Meta’s Chief Global Affairs Officer, Joel Kaplan, announced this on Tuesday via a blog post, noting that the Community Note program would start in the U.S.

Kaplan said the intention of the fact-checking program was to have 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.

He, however, noted that that has not played out the way it was intended as it has led to censorship and “too much content” being fact-checked.

“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,” he said.

Highlighting the success Community Note has had on a platform like X, formerly Twitter, Kaplan said:

“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.”

U.S. President-elect Donald Trump, was one of many top personalities affected by Meta’s stringent content moderation as he was temporarily banned from Facebook in the wake of the Jan. 6, 2021, US Capitol riot.