The fact-checking program for social networks Facebook and Instagram changes

2025-01-07 19:25:00, Tech CNA

The fact-checking program for social networks Facebook and Instagram changes

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Meta, which owns the social networks Facebook and Instagram, announced Tuesday that it is removing its third-party fact-checking program and will replace it with Community Notes, written by users. This will be a model similar to that of billionaire Elon Musk's social platform X.

Starting in the United States, Meta will end its fact-checking program in collaboration with outside experts. The company said it decided to end this program because the fact-checking experts themselves had their own biases and because the amount of material to be verified had increased too much.

Instead of this program, Meta will move to the Community Notes model, which utilizes a fact-checking mechanism through the collection of user-contributed information.

"We've seen this approach work at X — where they empower their own community to decide when posts are possibly misleading and when they need more context," said Meta's head of global affairs, Joel Kaplan.

Mr. Kaplan said the new system will be phased in over the coming months and that the company will continue to work to improve it over the coming year. During the transition, the company Meta will use labeling (labels), instead of warnings placed on certain posts.

The Associated Press used to participate in the company's Meta fact-checking program, but ended its participation a year ago.

The social media company also announced that it intends to allow more "expression of opinion" by removing some of the restrictions on topics that have become part of conventional discussion, such as immigration and gender, in order to focus on serious and illegal violations, such as EG terrorism, sexual exploitation of children and drugs.

The Meta company said its approach to building more complex systems to manage the content of materials on its platforms had "overshot the mark" and that it had "made numerous mistakes" by censoring content more than it should have.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged that the changes are partly driven by political developments, including the presidential election victory of President-elect Donald Trump.

"The recent election also gives the sense of a cultural turning point, reorienting again to prioritize freedom of expression," Mr. Zuckerberg said in a video message.

Meta's semi-independent supervisory board, which was created to serve as an arbiter for decision-making on contentious issues, said it welcomed the changes and looked forward to working with the company "to understand the changes in more detail." , to ensure that the new approach is as effective and supportive of freedom of expression as possible"./VOA