CALIFORNIA: Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, has announced several significant changes to social media platforms, run by Meta, aimed at simplifying its policies and focusing on reducing mistakes.
Citing a changing political and social scene and a commitment to support free speech, Zuckerberg will discontinue its program of fact-checker feature with reliable partners and switch to a community-driven mechanism similar to X’s ‘Community Notes‘.
According to Zuckerberg, the business is also reversing modifications that decreased the quantity of political content in user feeds and modifying its content control guidelines regarding political subjects. The changes will impact Threads as well as Facebook and Instagram, two of the biggest social media sites in the world with billions of users each.
In a post on Facebook, Mark along with sharing a video wrote, “It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression. We’re replacing fact checkers with Community Notes, simplifying our policies, and focusing on reducing mistakes. Looking forward to this next chapter.”
In a video posted on Facebook, Zuckerberg said “We are going to get back to our roots and focus on simplifying our policies and restoring free expression on our platforms.”
The billionaire said, “More specifically, the company would get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with community notes similar to X,” adding that the changes will first be available to the user in the U.S.
Furthermore, he said the recent U.S. elections felt like a cultural tipping point towards, once again, prioritizing speech.
“The business would continue to vigorously regulate content about drugs, terrorism, and child exploitation because the tools it had put in place to control its platforms were making too many mistakes,” he stated.
Zuckerberg added that the debate about “potential harms from online content” had led to Meta developing “complex systems” to moderate content, which led to “too many mistakes” and “too much censorship.”
