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A day after announcing that UFC President/co-founder Dana White would be joining Meta’s board, Facebook co-founder and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced sweeping changes to censorship on Facebook. In a video posted to his personal social media channels, Mark Zuckerberg outlined the changes ahead and the reasons he/Meta feels now is the time to make these changes.
Perhaps the biggest Facebook change announced by Mark Zuckerberg is Facebook will be getting ride of their third-party fact-checking program. In a blog post, Meta’s Chief Global Affairs Officer Joel Kaplan wrote “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.”
In his video announcement, Mark Zuckerberg said in lieu of their third-party fact-checking program, Facebook will be adopting a ‘Community Notes’ style program similar to what’s found on Elon Musk’s X. Within X’s Community Notes, users themselves vote on whether content is reliable, truthful, spam, worthy of being on the platform, etc. and then users receive a score within Community Notes based on their activity. Those who reliably rate posts within Community Notes see their scores go up and can create Community Notes themselves.
It’s not as simple as swapping out their third-party fact-checking program for Community Notes, however. In the blog post, Joel Kaplan wrote “Just like they do on X, Community Notes will require agreement between people with a range of perspectives to help prevent biased ratings.”
Here is Facebook co-founder and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announcing the changes ahead:
Community Notes has its own problems, to be sure. For starters, the only time I see notifications on X to address a Community Notes is en Español. Can I read in Spanish? Sure, but not well. Is there any reason X would know that? Absolutely not. I don’t interact with any Spanish language accounts on X nor have I ever responded to one of their Community Notes requests in Spanish but they still send me those notifications daily.
Also, Community Notes is inherently exploitable on the aggregate. If enough people pile on in Community Notes from th same perspective on a topic they can rate something as reliable when it is demonstrably false. It’s a ‘who watches The Watchmen’ situation over and over.
However, the third-party fact-checking program on Facebook has its faults. Mark Zuckerberg astutely points out that if they wrongly fact check only 1% of posts that means millions upon millions of mistakes. I’ve personally been on the wrong side of fact checking when sharing memes to Facebook and had to go through the Kafka-esque process of trying to get any strikes overturned all for harmless memes about HOAs.
Other Big Changes Coming To Facebook In Mark Zuckerberg’s Announcement
In addition to ditching the biased fact-checking, Mark Zuckerberg announced they will be “allowing more speech” on Facebook.
In the accompanying blog post, Facebook’s said they will “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.”
It is worth mentioning that just like any time Facebook rolls out new features… nothing is permanent. If these changes prove to be detrimental to the platform they could potentially be rolled back in the future. But for now, users on Meta’s platforms won’t be penalized from speech that is welcomed elsewhere in society. They will also begin to start promoting political content once again.
Their automated system that has been in place to catch violations will now only be used to catch the most high-level violations. They announced that “for less severe policy violations, we’re going to rely on someone reporting an issue before we take any action.”
From a content creator/publisher perspective, it will be interesting to see how phasing political content back into people’s Newsfeed will impact what users see. Facebook’s algorithm has always rewarded engagement with visibility and political content inherently receives a lot of engagement because it gets people charged up. There will certainly need to be measures in place to ensure politics doesn’t take over Facebook like a tidal wave.
Toss in the rising prevalence of AI-generated content on Facebook and it will be fascinating to see if Meta’s version of Community Notes can keep up with these sweeping changes ahead.