Facebook and Instagram will remove fact checkers for users in the United States, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced.
The social media company which owns Facebook, Instagram, Threads and WhatsApp will now offer a system similar to Elon Musk's X in which community notes allows users to comment on the accuracy of posts.
“We're gonna get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies and restoring free expression on our platforms,” Mr Zuckerberg said.
“First, we're gonna get rid of fact checkers and replace them with community notes, similar to X, starting in the US.”
View this post on Instagram
Mr Zuckerbeg claimed that after Trump was first elected in 2016, the legacy media wrote “non-stop” about how “misinformation was a threat to democracy”.
“We tried, in good faith, to address those concerns without becoming the arbiters of truth, but the fact checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they've created, especially in the US,” Mr Zuckerberg said.
Additionally, over the next few months, Meta are going to simplify their content policies and get rid of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are “just out of touch with mainstream discourse”.
“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,” Mr Zuckerberg said.
"Cosying up"
On The Pat Kenny Show, Irish Times business and technology journalist Ciara O’Brien said this move by Zuckerberg is more to do with Trump stepping back into the Presidential office rather than freedom of speech.
“We hear an awful lot of people talk about their freedom of speech and their freedom of expression in the US in particular,” she said.
“I think at this point, what we're seeing is Meta cosying up to the incoming administration.
“Over the last few days, we've seen a few moves - first of all, in recent days, Nick Clegg, who was the head of Global Policy for the company, left and was replaced by Joel Kaplan, who is a staunch Republican.
“In the last couple of days, Dana White, who's the CEO of UFC and a Trump ally, has joined the board of Meta.
“Now we have this move which seems to have taken a lot of people by surprise - particularly the fact-checking organisations in the US that Meta has been working with for several years to try and combat the flow of misinformation and disinformation on the service.”
"Massive step backwards"
Ms O’Brien said the change to policies hasn’t received as much attention as the decision to end third-party fact checking.
“It used to be that you couldn't refer to people in certain terms - so you couldn't refer to women as household objects or property, or transgender and non-binary people as ‘it’ according to the policies that governed Meta," she said.
"That has now been removed from their policies and there's a new section that will also allow people [to] talk about allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation.
“This is something that's being discussed in the political and religious discourse around transgender issues.
“Now that, to me, is a massive step backwards, and just because things are being talked about on TV and in the houses of Congress doesn't necessarily mean that we should have free reign as well to call people all these things.”
Ms O’Brien said these actions are "not a good move" when it comes to safety practices.
Meta/Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. 23/10/2019. Photo by Pat Benic/UPI Credit: UPI/Alamy Live News
