Meta Platforms Inc (NASDAQ:META, ETR:FB2A, SWX:FB) boss Mark Zuckerberg has pledged to end fact-checking on the company's Facebook, Instagram and Threads social media platforms, following meetings with President-Elect Donald Trump.
Zuckerberg said in a video announcement that the company will "get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with community notes", which he acknowledged was similar to that of Elon Musk's X (formerly Twitter).
He cited the recent US election, which he said "feel like a cultural tipping point towards, once again, prioritizing speech" over moderation.
"We will allow more speech by lifting restrictions on some topics that are part of mainstream discourse and focusing our enforcement on illegal and high-severity violations," Meta's new global affairs chief, Joel Kaplan, added in a blog post.
"We will take a more personalized approach to political content, so that people who want to see more of it in their feeds can."
Facebook launched its independent fact checking program in 2016, which Kaplan said was "the best and most reasonable choice at the time, which was to hand that responsibility over to independent fact checking organizations".
The intention was to give people more information, particularly on viral hoaxes, he noted, but this approach "has gone too far" and is now seeing "too many mistakes, frustrating our users and too often getting in the way of the free expression we set out to enable".
"Too much harmless content gets censored, too many people find themselves wrongly locked up in “Facebook jail,” and we are often too slow to respond when they do," he said.
Zuckerberg spent time with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort just after the election, in a sign of a thawing of relations between the pair, following harsh criticism of Meta for several years.
Trump was sent to 'Facebook jail' following the January 2021 Capitol attack, but his account was restored two years later.