Facebook, Instagram, and Threads are ditching third-party fact-checkers in favor of a Community Notes program inspired by X, according to an announcement penned by Meta’s new Trump-friendly policy chief Joe Kaplan. Meta is also moving its trust and safety teams from California to Texas.
“We’ve seen this approach work on X – where they empower their community to decide when posts are potentially misleading and need more context, and people across a diverse range of perspectives decide what sort of context is helpful for other users to see.” Meta said. “We think this could be a better way of achieving our original intention of providing people with information about what they’re seeing – and one that’s less prone to bias.”
The moderation changes are first being rolled out in the US, and aim to address complaints that Meta censors “too much harmless content” on its platforms, and is slow to respond to users who have their accounts restricted. Meta is also moving its trust and safety teams responsible for its content policies and content reviews content out of California to Texas and other US locations, instead of wholesale moving its California headquarters like Elon Musk did with SpaceX and X.
Meta says it’s also scrapping a number of current restrictions around topics like immigration and gender identity, and will start phasing political content back into users’ feeds on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads “with a more personalized approach.”
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