- Safiu Kehinde
The Chief Executive Officer of Meta Company, Mark Zuckerberg, has announced plan to remove fact-checkers across Facebook, Instagram, and Thread platforms.
Zuckerberg disclosed this in a post on his Instagram handle.
He expressed concern over the high rate of censorship which hinder free expression especially on political contents.
According to him, the global focus on censorship by governing bodies led Meta to develop complex system s in moderating contents.
“There have been several debates about potential harms of online contents. Governments and legacy media have pushed to censor more and more.
“A lot of these are clearly political, but there are also legitimately bad stuffs out there- drugs, terrorism, child exploitation.
“These are thing that we take very seriously and I want to make sure that we handle them responsibly.
“So we built a lot of complex systems to moderate contents.” He said.
However, Zuckerberg stated that many mistakes have been made by the systems, leading to too many censorship.
“But the problem with the system is they make mistakes.
“Even if they accidentally censor just one percent of posts, that’s millions of people.” He said
In an effort to restore free expression on Meta platforms, the Meta boss introduced four new policies which included the removal of Fact-Checkers.
He accused fact-checkers of being politically biased especially during elections.
“First, we are going to get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with Community Notes similar to X, starting in the US.
“After Trump first got elected in 2016, the legacy media wrote non-stop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy.
“We tried in good faith to address those concerns without becoming the arbiters of truth.
“But the fact-checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trusts than they created, especially in the U.S.
“So over the next couple of months, we are going to phase in a more comprehensive Community Note System.” Zuckerberg said.
Zuckerberg also vowed to simply content policies and get rid of bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration, gender.