Big Changes Coming to Facebook: Fact-Checkers Replaced + More

Big changes are coming to Facebook, Instagram and Threads, including the replacement of fact-checkers, according to an announcement from Mark Zuckerberg and Meta on Tuesday (Jan. 7).

The company said it will "dramatically reduce the amount of censorship" and encourage more political content on its platforms.

Zuckerberg announced the changes in a five-minute video posted to Facebook titled "It's time to get back to our roots around free expression."

One of the biggest changes he plans on implementing is the replacement of fact-checkers with community notes "similar to X."

X (formerly Twitter), which is owned by Elon Musk, leaves the responsibility of community notes to other users on the platform where they can add context to certain posts.

READ MORE: What You Should Know About New Service Terms for Facebook

Zuckerberg said that the reason for the change is that "fact-checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created."

He also said that Meta's content moderation teams will move from California to Texas "where there is less concern about the bias of our teams."

However, he admitted that the changes mean the company will "catch less bad stuff" happening on their platforms.

Yet, he said, "Governments and legacy media have pushed to censor more and more. A lot of this is clearly political, but there’s also a lot of legitimately bad stuff out there, drugs, terrorism, child exploitation. These are things that we take very seriously, and I want to make sure that we handle responsibly."

"We built a lot of complex systems to moderate content, but the problem with complex systems is they make mistakes, even if they accidentally censor just 1% of posts, that’s millions of people, and we’ve reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship. The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards, once again, prioritizing speech," he said.

He added that it's an effort to "reduce innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally take down."

Zuckerberg plans on aligning the company with Donald Trump when he becomes president later this month to "get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse" and "push back on governments around the world that are going after American companies and pushing to censor more."

All of this is apparently a move to favor "free speech."