Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Tuesday that Facebook and Instagram will eliminate their third-party fact-checking programs, replacing them with a user-generated “community notes” system similar to X (formerly Twitter).
The dramatic shift comes as President-elect Donald Trump prepares to take office, following years of Republican criticism that Meta’s fact-checking system showed political bias against conservative voices. The change mirrors X’s approach to content moderation implemented after Elon Musk’s acquisition of the platform in 2022.
Under the new system, users will be able to add context or corrections to posts, rather than having independent organizations verify content. Meta will also scale back its automated content filtering to focus primarily on illegal content and “high-severity violations” such as terrorism and child exploitation.
Zuckerberg acknowledged the change represents a “trade-off” that could lead to more problematic content appearing on the platforms. “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,” he said in a video announcement.
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The company is also relocating its trust and safety teams from California to Texas and adding Trump ally Dana White to its board. Joel Kaplan, a prominent Republican recently appointed as Meta’s Chief of Global Affairs, told Fox that the previous fact-checking partnerships were “well-intentioned” but showed “too much political bias.”
The changes will initially only affect U.S. users, with no immediate plans to remove third-party fact-checkers in the UK or EU. Meta’s fact-checking program, launched in 2016, currently works with over 90 organizations across more than 60 languages.
