Mark Zuckerberg dispensing with 3rd party fact checkers for FaceBook

In a stunning development, Facebook parent company Meta has decided to dispense with third party Fact Checkers comprising a board of academics, scholars and others who appeared to be left oriented ahead of President Elect Donald Trump taking oath of office in two weeks’ time on Jan 20th.
Meta has also given a Heads-Up to Trump about the sweeping changes coming into Facebook content moderation. The founder Mark Zuckerberg said there had been stories on anti-vaccination, and other subjects which appeared to be politically moderated.
There had been complaints that a number of foreign players were leveraging the outreach of Facebook to spread misinformation and misleading data to so discord among Americans especially at the time of elections. While Meta did not mention anyone by name, its widely presumed that the countries hacking into the Facebook platform data base and misusing it seem to be Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea who want to divert attention from main issues and influence public opinion on their side.
Facebook will now see several sweeping changes which could majorly alter the way posts are being made on its social media platform. Content in the form of texts, commentary and analysis in the form of videos and other content are moderated online, Meta will now adjust this content review policies on Facebook and Instagram, getting rid of fact checkers and replacing them with user-generated “community notes,” like Elon Musk’s X, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced.
Meta is making these change well ahead of President-elect Donald Trump taking office on Jan 20th this year. Trump and other Republicans have in the past come down heavily on Zuckerberg and Meta for what they alleged was censorship of right-wing voices.
“Fact checkers have been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created,” Zuckerberg said in a video announcing the new policy. “What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas, and it’s gone too far.” Zuckerberg, however, acknowledged a “trade-off” in the new policy, noting more harmful content will appear on the platform because of the content moderation changes.
Meta has now newly appointed the Chief of Global Affairs Joel Kaplan, a right winger. Kaplan told Fox news that Meta’s partnerships with third-party fact checkers were “well intentioned at the outset but there’s just been too much political bias in what they choose to fact check and how.”

There is now a clear ideological shift to the right in social media platforms and even in the media comprising newspapers and within Meta’s top ranks, and as Zuckerberg seeks to improve his relationship with Trump before the president-elect takes office later this month. Meta announced just a day earlier that Trump ally and UFC CEO Dana White would join its board, along with two other new directors.
Meta has also said it will donate $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund, and that Zuckerberg wants to take an “active role” in tech policy discussions.
Kaplan, a prominent Republican who was elevated to the company’s top policy job last week, acknowledged that the announcement is directly related to the changing administration.
“There’s “no question that there has been a change over the last four years.
We saw a lot of societal and political pressure, all in the direction of more content, moderation more censorship, and we’ve got a real opportunity. Now, we’ve got a new administration, and a new president coming in who are big defenders of free expression, and that makes a difference.”
Meta has given the Trump’s team a heads up that the moderation policy change was ensuing, informed sources said.
The Real Facebook Oversight Board — an outside accountability organization, whose name is a play on the company’s official group, comprised academics, lawyers and civil rights advocates including early Facebook investor Roger McNamee — said the policy changes represent Meta going “full MAGA.”
“Meta’s announcement is a retreat from any sane and safe approach to content moderation,” the group said in a statement, calling the changes “political pandering.”
A Significant Reversal of its earlier policies on content moderation
The moderation changes mark a stunning reversal in how Meta handles false and misleading claims on its platforms, social media observers said adding that in.
In 2016, the company launched an independent fact-checking program, in the wake of claims that it had failed to stop foreign actors from leveraging its platforms to spread disinformation and sow discord among Americans.
As years rolled by, Facebook grappled with the flow of spread controversial content on its platform, such as misinformation about elections, anti-vaccination stories, violence and hate speech.
The company built up safety teams, introduced automated programs to filter out or reduce the visibility of false claims and instituted a sort of independent Supreme Court for tricky moderation decisions, known as the Oversight Board.
Even as Meta’s fact checking partners maintained they checked claims from both the right and left, Trump supporters and other conservatives have long alleged that the system restricted their voices. Right wing voices were either shut out or their expressions were censored, GOP representatives alleged.
“Anything I put out there on our president (Trump) is there only for a few minutes and suddenly they’re fact checking me saying this and that and the other thing, which I know is not true. Their fact checkers are wrong,” Trump supporter told CNN at a rally in 2020.
Zuckerberg is falling in line with the general trend in social media platforms such as the immensely popular X (formerly Twitter) and is emulating the model of twitter buyer Elon Musk who rebranded it as X and changed the content flow in 2022. He dismantled the company’s fact-checking teams and made user-generated context labels called community notes the platform’s only method of correcting false claims.
Meta says it is ending its partnership with third-party fact checkers and instituting similar, community notes across its platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. This will be launched first in the US and follow in other countries.
Facebook and Instagram have a huge following in developing countries such as India but, the pattern of usage is slowly changing. Youngsters have switched from Facebook now widely used by elders for airing their views on political developments, which it went against the government in power, were attacked by right wing groups.
“I think Elon has played an incredibly important role in moving the debate and getting people refocused on free expression, and that’s been really constructive and productive,” Kaplan said.
Simultaneously, Meta also plans to adjust its automated systems that scan for policy violations, which it says have resulted in “too much content being censored that shouldn’t have been.” The systems will now be focused on checking only for illegal and “high severity” violations such as terrorism, child sexual exploitation, drugs, fraud, and scams. Other concerns will have to be reported by users before the company evaluates them.
Zuckerberg said Tuesday that Meta’s complex systems to moderate content have mistakenly resulted in too much non-violating content being removed from the platform. For example, if the systems get something wrong 1% of the time, that could represent millions of the company’s more than 2 billion users.

“We’ve reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship,” Zuckerberg said.
However, Zuckerberg acknowledged that the new policy could create new problems for content moderation. “The reality is this is a trade-off,” he said in the video. “It means that we’re going to catch less bad stuff, but we’ll also reduce the number of innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally take down.”
The company is also getting rid of content restrictions on certain topics, such as immigration and gender identity, and rolling back limits on how much politics-related content users see in their feeds, CNN said while reporting on the development.
While incorporating the new the changes, Meta will move its trust and safety teams responsible for content policies from California to Texas and other US locations. “I think that will help us build trust to do this work in places where there is less concern about the bias of our teams,” Zuckerberg said.
California is a blue state, and Texas is a red state which clearly shows that Meta is moving ultra-right to be on the right side of the GOP leaders, critics pointed out.
Source: Inputs from CNN