Facebook parent company Meta will abandon fact-checking and implement a Twitter/X-like community notes program.

The news comes from an announcement written by Meta’s new policy chief, Joel Kaplan, a prominent Republican and friend of U.S. President-elect Donald Trump, per The Verge. Meta also plans to move its trust and safety teams from California to Texas and other U.S. locations.

Meta will also eliminate several current restrictions on topics, including immigration and gender identity, and plans to phase political content back into users’ feeds across its platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, and Threads.

The company plans to roll out its community notes feature over the “next couple of months,” starting in the U.S. It’s not clear if or when we’ll see this expand to other regions.

Response to the changes has been mixed at best. On one hand, Twitter’s community notes feature is a powerful way to add additional information and context to posts, including outright correcting mis- and disinformation. But while Meta pitches the move as being “less prone to bias,” we’ve already seen evidence on Twitter of biased users weaponizing community notes to bury corrections they don’t agree with.

In a video accompanying the announcement, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg described the changes as returning to the company’s “roots around free expression,” which is particularly funny given the reports about Meta deleting posts from its employees that were critical of the company’s recent actions. 404 Media reported on Meta removing employee criticism of the company’s new board member, UFC president and CEO Dana White.

Regardless of what Zuckerberg or Meta say about free expression, the real motivations behind the change seem clear: currying favour with the incoming president and Republicans to avoid regulation while also opening the floodgates on content that will boost engagement by pissing people off. As we learned in 2021 from whistleblower reports, Facebook knows that angry content provokes engagement. Since the company’s algorithms focus on engagement, it encourages publishers to make angry, divisive content to increase their engagement and reach. Eliminating restrictions on polarizing topics and bringing back political content will likely boost engagement and help Meta make more money at a cost to people’s well-being.

Source: Meta Via: The Verge