Meta, the company that owns Facebook and Instagram, said Tuesday it will stop using its paid fact-checkers to edit user content and move to a “community notes” model similar to X/Twitter, where users can add their own notes and corrections to posts.
Facebook, Threads, and Instagram have a reputation among conservative users for harsh treatment of their social media comments by the contracted fact-checkers used by Meta. The company’s practices, for instance, have led some users like Must Read Alaska to not post political stories to the Meta-owned sites as frequently, due to the company’s censorship and shadow-banning, and “Facebook Jail” practices.
Must Read Alaska has found that Facebook censorship is real, and it is applied to conservative voices. Since 2021, Must Read content has been throttled back by Meta and user engagement has only occurred because people seek out the Must Read Alaska page.
In fact, stories like this are among the types we chose not to put on the Facebook platform because of the likelihood it would be removed, hidden, or would get a “strike” that could put MRAK in “Facebook Jail.”
“We’re replacing fact checkers with Community Notes, simplifying our policies and focusing on reducing mistakes,” said Meta majority owner and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. “Looking forward to this next chapter.”
Starting in the U.S., the company is ending its third party fact-checking program. The company said it will “allow more speech by lifting restrictions on some topics that are part of mainstream discourse and focusing our enforcement on illegal and high-severity violations.”
In another change, the company “will take a more personalized approach to political content, so that people who want to see more of it in their feeds can.”
Zuckerberg said, “In recent years we’ve developed increasingly complex systems to manage content across our platforms, partly in response to societal and political pressure to moderate content. This approach has gone too far. As well-intentioned as many of these efforts have been, they have expanded over time to the point where we are making too many mistakes, frustrating our users and too often getting in the way of the free expression we set out to enable. Too much harmless content gets censored, too many people find themselves wrongly locked up in ‘Facebook jail,’ and we are often too slow to respond when they do.”
Zuckerberg said he wants to return to “that fundamental commitment to free expression.”
When Facebook launched the independent fact checking program in 2016, it said it did not want it to be the arbiters of truth. The company thought it was a reasonable choice to hand over the fact-checking to third parties and tamp down the misinformation and hoaxes that can be seen online.
“That’s not the way things played out, especially in the United States. Experts, like everyone else, have their own biases and perspectives. This showed up in the choices some made about what to fact check and how. Over time we ended up with too much content being fact checked that people would understand to be legitimate political speech and debate. Our system then attached real consequences in the form of intrusive labels and reduced distribution. A program intended to inform too often became a tool to censor,” Zuckerberg said in a statement.
“We are now changing this approach. We will end the current third party fact checking program in the United States and instead begin moving to a Community Notes program. 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. 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,” he said.
He outlined the rollout:
- Once the program is up and running, Meta won’t write Community Notes or decide which ones show up. They are written and rated by contributing users.
- Just like they do on X, Community Notes will require agreement between people with a range of perspectives to help prevent biased ratings.
- He said Meta intends to be transparent about how different viewpoints inform the Notes displayed in its apps, and are working on the right way to share this information.
- People can sign up Jan. 7 (Facebook, Instagram, Threads) for the opportunity to be among the first contributors to this program as it becomes available.
“We plan to phase in Community Notes in the US first over the next couple of months, and will continue to improve it over the course of the year. As we make the transition, we will get rid of our fact-checking control, stop demoting fact checked content and, instead of overlaying full screen interstitial warnings you have to click through before you can even see the post, we will use a much less obtrusive label indicating that there is additional information for those who want to see it,” Zuckerberg said.
Zuckerberg admitted that his company has been over-enforcing its rules, and censoring “legitimate political debate and censoring too much trivial content and subjecting too many people to frustrating enforcement actions.”
In December alone, the company removed millions of pieces of content every day, he said. He believes up to 20% of those removals were mistakes in judgment by fact-checkers/censors.
“While these actions account for less than 1% of content produced every day, we think one to two out of every 10 of these actions may have been mistakes (i.e., the content may not have actually violated our policies). This does not account for actions we take to tackle large-scale adversarial spam attacks. We plan to expand our transparency reporting to share numbers on our mistakes on a regular basis so that people can track our progress. As part of that we’ll also include more details on the mistakes we make when enforcing our spam policies,” he said.
“We want to undo the mission creep that has made our rules too restrictive and too prone to over-enforcement. We’re getting rid of a number of restrictions on topics like immigration, gender identity and gender that are the subject of frequent political discourse and debate. It’s not right that things can be said on TV or the floor of Congress, but not on our platforms. These policy changes may take a few weeks to be fully implemented,” Zuckerberg said.
“We’re also going to change how we enforce our policies to reduce the kind of mistakes that account for the vast majority of the censorship on our platforms. Up until now, we have been using automated systems to scan for all policy violations, but this has resulted in too many mistakes and too much content being censored that shouldn’t have been. So, we’re going to continue to focus these systems on tackling illegal and high-severity violations, like terrorism, child sexual exploitation, drugs, fraud and scams. For less severe policy violations, we’re going to rely on someone reporting an issue before we take any action. We also demote too much content that our systems predict might violate our standards. We are in the process of getting rid of most of these demotions and requiring greater confidence that the content violates for the rest. And we’re going to tune our systems to require a much higher degree of confidence before a piece of content is taken down. As part of these changes, we will be moving the trust and safety teams that write our content policies and review content out of California to Texas and other US locations,” he said.
People are often given the chance to appeal the enforcement decisions, but the process can be frustratingly slow and doesn’t always get to the right outcome, he admitted.
As for political content, Meta, since Biden was sworn into office in 2021, has reduced the amount of information people can see about elections, politics or social issues. Zuckerberg said that is what users told the company it wanted.
“But this was a pretty blunt approach. We are going to start phasing this back into Facebook, Instagram and Threads with a more personalized approach so that people who want to see more political content in their feeds can,” Zuckerberg said.
“We’re continually testing how we deliver personalized experiences and have recently conducted testing around civic content. As a result, we’re going to start treating civic content from people and Pages you follow on Facebook more like any other content in your feed, and we will start ranking and showing you that content based on explicit signals (for example, liking a piece of content) and implicit signals (like viewing posts) that help us predict what’s meaningful to people. We are also going to recommend more political content based on these personalized signals and are expanding the options people have to control how much of this content they see,” he said.
The makeover isn’t getting the job done, Zuck.
He is just changing his to him because Trump is in charge now and he’s afraid of what Trump do to his precious company and money. He is like a reptile change colors depending on who’s in charge don’t fall for this fake stuff. Zuckerberg is who Zuckerberg is a lowlife?
Zuckerberg isn’t changing his philosophy but is seeking to keep what he’s got! He’s beyond brown nosing to the point of having ring around the collar! He is immoral and shameless.
Never forget the deletions and censoring!
Yeah, who needs fact checking when you can peddle conspiracy theories without consequence?
If you cannot even see the post, there is no chance to fact check it.
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Or do you think the super intelligent and omniscient individuals working at Facebook are capable to knowing all the facts, and their removal or suppression of posts is not done with any personal/political bias at all? Because that is absolutely ridiculous.
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Best response to false information is for people to present the facts. It is not to suppress others.
Sounds good in theory and I understand the point you’re making, but when its the very public that posits conspiracy theories or downright factually incorrect information that it also the body doing the fact checking, how does that ensure truth prevails?
It does not.
On the other hand, how does a line worker at FB know they are suppressing a post that is misinformation?
Remember when COVID came from a lab leak was misinformation? I do. Turns out the people demanding those posts get taken down were 100% wrong.
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How does it ensure the truth prevails? The truth will come out if open discussion is allowed. Suppressing any opinion, no matter how contrary it is to the narrative, destroys any ability for the truth to come out.
No matter how objectionable an opinion might be, to ban it would be a mistake because you deprive yourself of having your mind changed. As long as the truly nutty “facts” are identified as such, then its all good.
Objectionable opinions are why the 1st Amendment exists. it is not freedom of speech if you only allow opinions you agree with to be voiced.
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And, the nuttiest “facts” are exposed as nutty rapidly. For instance, someone could claim that a cabal of super intelligent beings are controlling society all while sitting on technology that could advance us by light years. They can post that opinion, and it will soon be challenged. The population as a whole will not be swayed much because of the unrealistic nature of the claim.
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But, more realistically, there was no reason to suppress claims about COVID-19. No matter how crazy they were, reality won out. Same with claims about 9/11, October 7th, super intelligent alien races, and Taylor Swift. Let them get spread around, people can identify facts from fiction.
So who gets to decide what is a “nutty fact” and what are “truths”?
The algorithm? Pajama boy at FB?
Whatever happened to free speech?
Why not simply let statements stand on their own, to be evaluated by each individual reader?
It seems you are implying that the general public is too uneducated to discern for themselves what is true and what works for THEIR lives and can’t function without a “guide” or “label”?
That’s pretty presumptuous of you.
I think the “general public” has shown itself to be fairly ignorant but that’s not really the fault of the public, its the results of the broken public education system in this country.
It is the “fairly ignorant” that is demanding fact checks and removal of what they think is mis/disinformation.
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And, that is the problem.
I disagree. Every person has life experience and common sense. Everyone makes a judgement regarding any situation. Respectful healthy debate allowing ALL to participate, is as much about facts, as it is about learning and judging the veracity of the statements offer.
You do not need a doctorate in biochemistry to know that the recent “alcohol warning” from the surgeon general is nothing but a political hack job.
Cman – You do know that the phrase “Conspiracy Theory” was originally coined by the CIA in response to the public outcry after the JFK assassination, don’t you? Look it up!
Cman, you are consistently wrong and continue to peddle disinformation, but you are allowed to do so. All the time.
However, the people around here call you out for your BS. That is how it works. If you don’t like it, you can self censor in your basement and leave handling truth to the rest of the waking humanity.
And you understand that just because you claim I’m consistently wrong, doesn’t make it so, correct? I’m assuming you meant the reference to me being in a basement as some type of insult? Not certain why you felt that would strengthen your argument but like you say, you are allowed to do so.
See how censorship works now cman?
If Notary was in a fact check position at FB, your comments here on MRAK would never see the light of day.
Point taken!
Remember it.
Seriously. What you just learned is very important.
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Personally, I would love it if there was some organization that would ensure everything I see on the news is a 100% assured perfect fact. That would be great.
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But, reality gets in the way. Damn reality.
And, in reality, saying things that go against the narrative can be annoying, but it has a much greater potential to create change.
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Stifling that expression of opinion is the antithesis of progress. Even when the opinions expressed are factually incorrect.
I don’t disagree with you at all on this point. One of the reasons I come on here and comment is because I want to know the opinions of people who likely vehemently disagree with me. I only wish so many on here could stop with the personal insults and just point out that they disagree with me and why. I know I have sometimes gotten personal as well, but I really try not to do so as I don’t think it helps matters much. However, when some feel that someone is “evil” or a “communist” just because they take a different view, that seems like a lazy way to be living ones life. But who knows, maybe I’m in a minority on that point.
cman:
Call them like you see them.
If someone is acting like a leftist, I will say so. But, I will provide a justification for my saying so. For example, one person who claims to be a conservative always support more government intrusion into people’s lives. Not conservative, leftist. So, I say so.
Fine but I guess I don’t see how name calling or labeling people leads to an informed or productive debate.
I am all for fact-checking, but it should be done by me not some faceless algorithm or guy sitting somewhere in the bowels of Meta. Fact-checking happens when we present different points, contemplate different opinions and theories and let the INDVIDUAL user decide for themselves to form an informed opinion. We are all capable of this. We have all this information at our fingertips and it is your choice to use it or just believe what those aforementioned algorithms or “fact-checkers” tell you. Trust but verify, instead of intellectually lazy acquiescence. The best way to get a better picture is to have an actual discussion where people are forced to defend their “facts” and the way they arrived at them.
Not so fast, Zuck! Your “fact checkers” have maligned and demonized too many Facebook users who, as it turns out, were posting entirely true and accurate information on Facebook. Time for Trump’s new AG to start investigating Zuckerberg and perhaps initiate a Class Action lawsuit for libeling users and criminal charges for election interference. Elections have consequences!
After six or more long years of silencing conservative voices, canceling people who questioned covid response, colluding with the government to crush any dissenting voices, The Zuck suddenly finds religion? No, folks, this is about shuffling his feet to appear that FaceBook is becoming more like X to avoid legislation that would stop the censorship the he promoted. And also to help stem the tide of people moving away from FaceBook because of the way he’s handled conservatives, religious people, dogma doubters and more.
Old adage:
If they are giving it to you for free, you are the product.
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FB makes billions a year selling your information. FB makes something like $13 per user. If a billion users flee FB to go to X, they lose $13B in revenue. If the reason they are going to X is because FB is restricting free speech under the guise of stopping “misinformation”, FB will do what they can to get those users to stay.
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Right now, BlueSky is gaining users rapidly, but as soon as the new users find out how restrictive that platform is, they will depart just as quickly.
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People want the ability to speak freely. As soon as a social platform starts restricting that, it will start bleeding users.
MRAK talking about censoring content is hilarious. Susan blocks more posts than she allows through from anyone who doesn’t subscribe to the MAGA mentality. It is the MAGA community that claims censorship when they get called out for the outright lies they spew. In the old days MRAK would be regulated to a mimeographed conspiracy newsletter of maybe a 100 copies.
This is false and also proof that I have a really light touch on putting people in the trash when they deserve it. – sd
I dont know if its Susan who deletes my posts .
None of mine have managed to post for months.
OK, Alaskan for freedom.
Prove it.
Tell me how many posts Suzanne receives in a day.
Then tell me how many posts Suzanne deletes.
What percentage of the comments never see the time of day?
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If you do not know, you are the one peddling misinformation.
Going to have to disagree with you there Alaskans. I rarely agree with Suzanne and the articles she posts on here, but I would say more than 90% of the comments I make on here are posted. And at the end of the day, its her universe and she has every right to censor whatever she wants.
Cman, so why are you here? Surely you can find forum that is more suitable to your belief system. Has your knitting hobby left you this bored?
We’re here to challenge disinformation, to push back on the MAGA ideology, and to call out those whose boorish behaviors deserve it. And we’re her to stay.
And, I for one am glad you are here.
Questioning the narrative is important. Challenging the widely held beliefs is how breakthroughs in physics, medicine, aerospace, and IT have been accomplished.
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But, I will make one request.
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Just because a person you see as MAGA says something, do not just contradict. That is not helpful.
That is mostly what you what you pissy little betas do all the time.
Ad hominem is what people without a defensible position resort to, so please continue as it says way more about you than me.
Sadly if you have to call people names you already lost the argument!
I agree and I will do my best to remember your request. I just hope it goes both ways.
A favorite quote from Abraham Lincoln goes something like this: “I don’t think I like that man very much. I must get to know him better”.
We don’t want an echo chamber, like FB. Circular thinking never got anyone anywhere.
I disagree with a great deal of cman’s posts, as we come from two different philosophical ends of the spectrum. Yet I am glad that he makes me articulate “WHY” I hold certain opinions and morals. Questioning refines ones understanding of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Generokee, would you prefer if you only ever encountered people that agree with you in your life? How can you possibly hope to learn anything living that way?
AKFF a bold statement!
I believe however that the facts are not on your side:
“Comments galore: This year MRAK has approved nearly 64,000 comments on stories, which is about 95% of the comments made and an average of 27 comments per story. Since 2016, we’ve approved over 309,000 comments, (and we appreciate all of you who keep it respectful and do your best on spelling and grammar.)” That would be about 3200 rejected comments per year or about 266 out of 5333 per month.
There are a myriad of comments from those, who do not agree with the conservative point of view. We routinely hear from you, Greg, cman, Frank, 3rd generation, Sebastian…..
There is however the question whether or not your commentary is so uncouth at times, as not to be fit to print? That would be a self-limiting action on your part and more work for Suzanne. Being respectful is part of having a conversation among adults.
Oh and out of idle curiosity, what “outright lies” are you referring to?
I believe fb is doing this to justify the real misinformation being posted about the incoming trump admin
“Zuckerbucks” is not the only one blocking the real truth and guilty of peddling the type of misinformation capable of swaying an election.
How is it that 50 of the nations high level security personnel collaborated on the content of Hunters laptop he donated to a repairman while intoxicated all as russian misinformation.
Would Joe still received 81 million votes had that information been circulated?
Hillary Clinton spent millions of democratic donations to fund a phony dossier against her opponent using the FBI to investigate at taxpayers expense.
The silver lining to Hillary’s lie was that after all that taxpayer’s expense of investigating “Russiagate” she still lost the election AND Trump won a second round.
Considering all the information that was blocked and phony information used to hide the truth regarding “Kungflu” was enough to make anyone with common sense doubt anything said or printed by America’s government.
Typical response from a guy that’s got (and wants badly to keep) a monopoly… and who developed a God-complex but finally realizes he’s made more than half of America mad as can be. I for one would love to see a few of these Internet monopolies busted apart.
Cman – You do know that the phrase “Conspiracy Theory” was originally coined by the CIA in response to the public outcry after the JFK assassination, don’t you? Look it up!
Two Faced Book….lousy communist punk must not be trusted ever! He spent around a half Billion dollars to defeat Trump, which worked in 2020 only because of fraud including the Suckerbucks program. For God’s sake folks, give credit only when due, and it ain’t due to Markie!