A significant free speech shake-up at Meta after President Donald Trump‘s election is about to bring major censorship changes to social media.
As part of a free speech overhaul, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced in January that his platforms would redo their fact-checking program, switching from aggressive and biased “third-party” fact checkers to an X-style community notes model. The company stated in a Thursday press release that a test of the new system will be deployed across Meta platforms Facebook, Instagram and Threads. While fact-checking censorship will unfortunately continue to occur on the platforms, this marks a major shift at Meta. The goal, Meta wrote, is not “to be the arbiters of truth” online.
Meta will deploy the new community notes model on March 18, per the press release. “We expect Community Notes to be less biased than the third-party fact-checking program it replaces because it allows more people with more perspectives to add context to posts,” Meta asserted. It cited X’s model as inspiring and assisting its new program. Meta claims notes “won’t have penalties associated with them the way fact checks did.” This is significant because it is different from the community notes used by X.
The company added, “Notes won’t appear publicly initially as we take time to ensure the system is working properly.” The company has already had 200,000 potential fact-checking contributors sign up. When fully operational, the company announced that notes would only become public if contributors with differing viewpoints agree on them, and the notes will have a limit of 500 characters with a requirement for a source link to be provided.
Initially, the notes will be provided in six languages—English, Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese, French and Portuguese—according to the press release. The notes can appear on almost any sort of content except advertisements.
MRC Free Speech America will continue to monitor and analyze the new fact-checking program to expose whether or not Meta is living up to its promises or still engaging in biased censorship. Notably, X owner Elon Musk recently expressed a desire to overhaul X Community Notes due to repeated instances of biased censorship.
Conservatives are under attack. Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on “hate speech” and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us at the Media Research Center contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.
