Meta ending third-party fact-checking on Facebook, Instagram

Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, announced on Tuesday that it is ending third-party fact-checking and removing speech restrictions across the social media platforms.

“We’re going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies and restoring free expression on our platforms,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a video posted Tuesday morning, Fox News reported. “More specifically, we’re going to get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with Community Notes similar to X, starting in the U.S.”

Zuckerberg said that instead of relying on third-party groups and news organizations to check facts, Facebook and Instagram will rely on users to add notes or corrections to posts that may contain false or misleading statements according to The New York Times.

He added that changes will include removing restrictions “on topics like immigration and gender that are out of touch with mainstream discourse.”

The announcement comes a day after Meta announced that UFC President Dana White would be among three new members of its board of directors, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Meta’s fact-checking decision is similar to what Elon Musk has employed on X. Musk has relied on community notes to flag misleading posts, according to the Times.

Meta’s third-party fact-checking program was implemented after the 2016 election as a way to “manage content,” Fox News reported.

At the time, Facebook had been criticized for unchecked information on its platform, according to the Times. Yielding to public pressure, Zuckerberg turned to organizations like The Associated Press, ABC News and the fact-checking site Snopes, the newspaper reported. Also assisting to view potentially false or misleading posts on Facebook and Instagram were other global organizations vetted by the International Fact-Checking Network.

The program included more than 90 organizations that checked posts in more than 60 languages, NBC News reported.

Joel Kaplan, Meta’s chief global affairs officer, told Fox News Digital in an interview that the company is “ending that completely.”

“It has become clear there is too much political bias in what they choose to fact-check because, basically, they get to fact-check whatever they see on the platform,” Kaplan told the news outlet.

Now, “instead of going to some so-called expert, it instead relies on the community and the people on the platform to provide their own commentary to something that they’ve read,” Kaplan added.

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