Meta caves - Discards "Fact Checking" for Community Notes

[connda]

Robbie Starbucks may not have led a campaign against Meta and Facebook, but the "Go Woke, Go Broke" meme seems to be having an effect in corporate boardrooms.
Facebook's parent company, Meta, is ditching "Fact Checking" and instead are moving to an X "free-speech" style Community Notes model.

From Mark Zuckerberg:

When we launched our independent fact checking program in 2016, we were very clear that we didn't want to be the arbiters of truth. We made what we thought was the best and most reasonable choice at the time, which was to hand that responsibility over to independent fact checking organizations. The intention of the program was to have these independent experts give people more information about the things they see online, particularly viral hoaxes, so they were able to judge for themselves what they saw and read.

That's not the way things played out, especially in the United States. 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. Our system then attached real consequences in the form of intrusive labels and reduced distribution. A program intended to inform too often became a tool to censor.

We are now changing this approach. We will end the current third party fact checking program in the United States and instead begin moving to a Community Notes program. We've seen this approach work on X – where they empower their community to decide when posts are potentially misleading and need more context, and people across a diverse range of perspectives decide what sort of context is helpful for other users to see. We think this could be a better way of achieving our original intention of providing people with information about what they're seeing – and one that's less prone to bias.

• Once the program is up and running, Meta won't write Community Notes or decide which ones show up. They are written and rated by contributing users. 
• Just like they do on X, Community Notes will require agreement between people with a range of perspectives to help prevent biased ratings.
• We intend to be transparent about how different viewpoints inform the Notes displayed in our apps, and are working on the right way to share this information.

We plan to phase in Community Notes in the US first over the next couple of months, and will continue to improve it over the course of the year. As we make the transition, we will get rid of our fact-checking control, stop demoting fact checked content and, instead of overlaying full screen interstitial warnings you have to click through before you can even see the post, we will use a much less obtrusive label indicating that there is additional information for those who want to see it."

 

[Social Media]

//Closed//

 

Topic is running here:

 

Meta Shifts Focus to Free Speech with New Community Notes System