By Kelvin Chan, Barbara Ortutay and Nicholas Riccardi
Bending to the political headwinds of the incoming Trump administration, Facebook and Instagram owner Meta is scrapping its third-party fact-checking program and replacing it with “community notes” written by users similar to the model used by Elon Musk’s social platform X.
Announcing the policy shift Tuesday, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the latest election heralded “a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech.”
The tech giant said expert fact checkers have their own biases and too much content ends up being fact checked, and that it is pivoting to crowdsourcing contributions from users.
“We’ve seen this approach work on X – where they empower their community to decide when posts are potentially misleading and need more context,” Meta’s Chief Global Affairs Officer Joel Kaplan said in a blog post. He said the new system will be phased in over the coming months.
Meta is among several tech companies apparently working
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