Facebook Fact Checking To End? Simplifying Zuckerberg’s New Year Resolution

Mark Zuckerberg is one of the world’s few business leaders who knows how to hog the media attention. Ahead of US President-Elect Donald Trump’s return to the White House, Zuck took to Facebook and revealed his latest New Year’s resolution – getting rid of Meta’s fact-checking system. 

Not only that, he pledges to bring about more changes to ensure that Meta’s social media platforms allow more freedom of speech without the fear of being censored by its automated systems and biased teams. 

Is that a sudden change of heart for the Founder of the world’s most controversial social media company? Or are you sensing political intentions? Maybe Mark intends to take a leaf out of Elon Musk’s book and make the US authorities favour his social media platforms.

Regardless of the reasons, Facebook, Instagram and Threads are about to change again. Hence, we assumed it would be a good time to revisit all the announcements and take you through all the changes that will affect your experience with Meta’s social media platforms. 

ALSO READ: WhatsApp Borrows a Fun New Feature From Google Images

So what is changing on Facebook, Instagram & Threads?

In essence, Zuckerberg is going to bring the following changes:

- Ending third-party fact-checking policies. Zuckerberg says that third-party bodies often have a biased approach to moderation, thus negating the notion of freedom of speech. 

- Introduce Community Notes, like X, to let people decide what’s misleading and what’s not. The feature will require an agreement between contributors from various perspectives to avoid biased ratings.

- No fullscreen overlay warnings before viewing fact-checked content

- No restrictions on topics like immigration, gender identity and gender. Basically topics that are the subject of frequent political discourse and debate.

ALSO READ: Use Palmsy: Get Rid of Social Media Addiction

- Censorship systems to now focus on tackling illegal and severe violations like terrorism, child sexual exploitation, drugs, fraud and scams. For less severe policy violations, Meta’s platforms will now rely on people reporting an issue, upon which action will be taken to address the issue. 

- In the case of any objection to content being flagged off, there will be more personnel at hand to take care of the issue and get the review done faster. 

- Large Language Models (LLMs) will be used to get a second opinion on any content before being taken down by the moderation team. Good use of AI here!

- For account recovery, the moderation teams are testing facial recognition technology to speed up the process and make it secure. 

- Lastly, Meta won’t be moderating any political content on its social media platforms going forward. This means that people will continue to interact with political posts and videos in the same was as content from regular people.  

ALSO READ: Opinion: What Happened to the Twitter Alternatives?

Will this spoil the social media experience on Meta platforms?

With the proposed changes to content moderation on Meta platforms, you can expect the overall user experience to revert to the pre-2021 situation. Moderation would be happening on explicit content people would now have more freedom over other topics, especially related to political and gender views. The experience is likely to get similar to what we see on X these days. 

Would that affect your usage of Facebook, Instagram and Threads?

ALSO READ: Indian Govt Slaps INR 213 Crore Fine on Meta! Reason Includes WhatsApp