Meta's decision to swap professional U.S. fact-checkers with crowd-sourced moderation has raised fears that Facebook and Instagram could become magnets for misinformation similar to the Elon Musk-owned X, researchers say.
Meta's chief executive Mark Zuckerberg announced Tuesday the tech giant was ending its third-party fact-checking program in the United States and turning over the task of debunking falsehoods to ordinary users under a model known as "Community Notes," popularized by X.
The decision comes after years of criticism from supporters of President-elect Donald Trump, among others, that conservative voices were being censored or stifled under the guise of fighting misinformation, a claim professional fact-checkers vehemently reject.
The announcement, which included plans for slashing content moderation and "restoring free expression" on its platforms, included an acknowledgement from Zuckerberg that the policy shift meant "we're going to catch less bad stuff."
"Abandoning formal fact-checking for crowdsourcing tools like Community Notes has failed platforms in the past," Nora Benavidez, senior counsel at the nonprofit watchdog Free Press, told AFP.
"Twitter tried it and can't withstand the volume of misinformation and other violent, violative content," she added.
After his 2022 purchase of Twitter, rebranded as X, Musk gutted trust and safety teams and introduced Community Notes, a crowd-sourced moderation tool that the platform has promoted as the way for users to add context to posts.
Researchers say the lowering of the guardrails on X, and the reinstatement of once-banned accounts of known peddlers of misinformation, has turned the platform into a haven for misinformation.
Studies have shown Community Notes can work to dispel some falsehoods such as vaccine misinformation, but researchers caution that it works best for topics where there is broad consensus.
"Although research supports the idea that crowdsourcing fact-checking can be effective when done correctly, it is important to understand that this is intended to supplement fact-checking from professionals -- not to replace it," said Gordon Pennycook, from Cornell University.
"In an information ecosystem where misinformation is having a large influence, crowdsourced fact-checking will simply reflect the mistaken beliefs of the majority," he added.
Meta's new approach ignores research that shows "Community Notes users are very much motivated by partisan motives and tend to over-target their political opponents," added Alexios Mantzarlis, director of the Security, Trust, and Safety Initiative at Cornell Tech.
By comparison, a study published last September in the journal Nature Human Behavior showed that warning labels from professional fact-checkers reduced belief in –- and the sharing of -– misinformation even among those "most distrusting of fact-checkers."
Ending the fact-checking program opens the floodgates for harmful misinformation, researchers say.
"By axing his factcheckers, Zuckerberg has ripped out yet another of his companies' safety measures on platforms such as Facebook and Instagram," said Rosa Curling, co-executive director of UK-based legal activist firm Foxglove, which has backed a lawsuit against Meta in Kenya.
"If he's all-in on the Musk playbook, the next step will be slashing yet more of his content moderator numbers," including those that take down violent content and hate speech.
As part of the overhaul, Meta has said it will relocate its trust and safety teams from liberal California to the more conservative state of Texas.
AFP currently works in 26 languages with Facebook's fact-checking program, including in the United States and the European Union.
Meta has also announced major updates to its moderation policies, in a move that advocacy groups said lowers the bar against hate speech and harassment of minorities.
The latest version of Meta's community guidelines said its platforms allow users to accuse people of "mental illness or abnormality" based on their gender or sexual orientation.
Abandoning industry-standard hate speech policies makes Meta's platforms "unsafe places," said Sarah Kate Ellis, president of the advocacy group GLAAD.
Without these policies, "Meta is giving the green light for people to target LGBTQ people, women, immigrants, and other marginalized groups with violence, vitriol, and dehumanizing narratives," Ellis added.
© 2025 AFP
16 Comments
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GBR48
They haven't got a choice. New King on the throne. Expect more of this. Don't blame Meta, blame anyone you know who was too lazy to vote, or voted for you know who.
User-based group moderation can work much better than top down censorship, if you design it well. Even if it is badly done, you'll be doing well if you can spot the hate amongst all the adverts.
And of course you can always just lock down your feed and create a community with your friends, which is what social media was all about in the first place. I've been on Facebook since it started and haven't seen any 'harmful misinformation' or hate yet. I guess you only see these things if you go looking for them. So there is an easy solution there.
And you can always ditch social media if you want. Nobody is forcing you to be on it.
Zaphod
Speech that you do not like is not "unsafe". Her "safety" is a weasel word for censorship.
"There was no time in history where the people censoring free speech were the good guys."
(Robert F. Kennedy Jr.)
Zaphod
GBR48
She can go to "Bluesky" which has all the censorship she wants. No need to complain about the neighbours backyard.
Bob Fosse
You are either deliberately misunderstanding or just plain don’t understand.
Hate speech (mentioned in the quote you chose to post) and free speech are not the same thing. This is very clear to almost everybody.
Eat the left
Hate speech: anything negative conservatives say against non-conservatives.
Misinformation: anything conservatives say that liberals don't like.
How come Clinton was never jailed for calling half the population deplorable? Hate speech right there.
Zaphod
Bob Fosse
Oh really? Define "hate speech".
FizzBit
LOL
Like WMD's in Iraq, Russiagate, the "insurrection", Hunter's laptop and the 51 former intelligent officials, and all the other massive MSM BS?
falseflagsteve
So calling people mentally ill due to the lifestyle choices is wrong? Of course some may be offended but this par for the course, it’s life. You cannot be shielded all your life from other humans views like a baby.
Well, it’s easy to lock people on those platforms and from what I’ve seen those who complain the most are usually the less tolerant and more likely to be abusive to others.
Bob Fosse
Sure.
“abusive or threatening speech or writing that expresses prejudice on the basis of ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, or similar grounds.”
You can’t be just hearing about this. Debate about social media ‘censoring’ is a waste of time. They are private companies and can do as they please.
You don’t have freedom of speech on JT for example, but here you are.
Can I help you with anything else today?
bass4funk
I am just happy that Facebook is now a site everyone can once again rejoice in. Time to re-open my account.
Zaphod
Bob Fosse
OK. "Threatening speech" can be addressed legally, and if that is the definition of "hate speech" I am fine with it. The other ones are weasel words and an invitation to authoritarian censorship. How decides what is a "prejudice"? Public forums should not be forced to police opinion.
Yes, so Zuckerberg should be free to make Fbook free speech again. What is your problem with that?
Sadly, yes. That still does not mean that censorship is a good thing.
wallace
I'm just happy I haven't used any social network for more than a decade.
Bob Fosse
Did I say I had a problem with it? No.
Do you need a definition for that too?
Explain something to me; it’s your turn.
Why is it generally those who talk about ‘snowflakes’, ‘woke’, ‘triggered’ etc you know, the ones obsessed with this stuff, still need to be spoon fed about it?
theFu
Read on Facebook that Trump stole the election. He paid Russia to deploy bot farms to sway Americans to dislike the current people in charge and to claim the economy was failing and that the borders were all open. Clearly a Trump+Russia project and far too many Americans fell for.
And I believe it 100%. Just look at how vigilantly some of the posters here are in their Pro-Trump stance and their anti-Biden stance. There can't be any other reason. Trump+Musk paid Russia to steal the election.
Every year, I open up my home network to allow access to social network websites for a few hours as I re-new my accounts there, to be certain they don't expire so someone else cannot get them and claim to be me or a relation to me. Best to keep the access off at the network layer to prevent as much tracking as possible.
Facebook "Like" buttons are all created for tracking, if you didn't know that. Those buttons are created with individually unique URLs, so they know exactly which page you viewed to 'HTTP-GET' the specific button. Then they can snag a cookie or supercookie from your browser to track exactly where you've been across all "LIke" buttons and other Facebook tracking methods (like embedded videos and 1x1 pixel "bugs".
Google does the same thing AND gets website owners to actually embed the Google tracking for them.
There are lots of other trackers out there. Many hide as "content delivery networks", so at least we end-users get faster access to the information we actually want.
TaiwanIsNotChina
Meta is now announcing they will just push political excrement on you whether you want it or not.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/clyjyd0297go
Social media was a mistake.
zulander
"Professional Fact Checkers" lol.