“We are going to restore freedom of speech” said Mark Zuckerberg, the head of Meta, the big tech company which owns Facebook and Instagram.

In a video, Zuckerberg acknowledges that “what started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideass”.

Some Christian organisations where among the groups that had denounced that their contents were less visible to followers beacuse of its religious nature.

Fact-checkers with many mistakes

The founder of Facebook now says that there have been too many mistakes on the platforms he owns. According to Zuckerberg, freedom of expression was much affected in discussions online of users around topics like immigration or gender. “We have reached a point where it's just too many mistakes and too much censorship”, he adds.

“After years of having our content moderation work focused primarily on removing content, it is time to focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our systems, and getting back to our roots about giving people voice”, he concludes in the video.

The figure of social media fact-checkers began in 2016, in the context of the US election that ended with the vfirst victory of Donald Trump vs Hillary Clinton.

Since then, “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 trust than they've created, especially in the US”.

The ‘community notes’

“We are going to get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with community notes similar to X”, he announced, following the changes Elon Musk implemented when he bought the former Twitter. X has been criticised by many for the rise of violent and radical content shared on its platform.

The ‘community notes’ would now allow Facebook and Instagram users to report potentially misleading posts, add information or links that enrich the information being shared, or even disprove it. So far, such work was done by hired experts. On competitor social media X, users provide context about a post, offering information that is often essential to avoid misleading users. Afterwards, it is the community itself that votes whether such context is the most useful and truthful, so that other users can see it. That system has its own problems, as many experts warn, since those who post the notifications may have malicious intentions or just not having the whole picture of a certain event.

For now, the changes will only apply to the United States for now, said the CEO of Meta. Zuckerberg also added that the company will focus its moderation system on potentially dangerous and harmful content, mainly related to drugs, terrorism and child exploitation.

The owner of Meta used the announcement to also express his desire to work closely with the new US president. He also criticised what he sees as "censorship" laws in the European Union, as well as the restrictions for internet users in China and Latin America.