• Wion - World News

A United Nations study has found that a majority of these influencers don’t verify information before sharing it with their audiences. The UN’s scientific and cultural arm, UNESCO, has raised concerns that in doing so, several huge online

Facebook and Instagram owner Meta said Tuesday it’s 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 media platform X.

Starting in the U.S., Meta will end its fact-checking program with independent third parties. The company said it decided to end the program because expert fact checkers had their own biases and too much content ended up being fact checked.

Mark Zuckerberg talks about the Orion AR glasses during the Meta Connect conference on Sept. 25, in Menlo Park, Calif.

Instead, it will pivot to a Community Notes model that uses crowdsourced fact-checking contributions from users.

β€œWe’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.

Kaplan said the new system will be phased in over the next couple of months, and the company will work on improving it over the year. As part of the transition, Meta will use labels to replace warnings overlaid on posts that it forces users to click through.

The Associated Press had participated in Meta’s fact-checking program previously but ended its participation a year ago.

The social media company also said it plans to allow β€œmore speech” by lifting some restrictions on some topics that are part of mainstream discussion such as immigration and gender in order to focus on illegal and β€œhigh severity violations” like terrorism, child sexual exploitation and drugs.

Meta said that its approach of building complex systems to manage content on its platforms has β€œgone too far” and has made β€œtoo many mistakes” by censoring too much content.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged that the changes are in part sparked by political events including Donald Trump’s presidential election victory.

β€œThe recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech,” Zuckerberg said in an online video.

Meta’s quasi-independent Oversight Board, which was set up to act as a referee on controversial content decisions, said it welcomed the changes and looked forward to working with the company β€œto understand the changes in greater detail, ensuring its new approach can be as effective and speech-friendly as possible.”

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