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Meta is joining X and YouTube in shifting moderation to users. Are you ready?
By Stuart A. Thompson and Kate Conger
Stuart Thompson covers the spread of false and misleading information online from New York. Kate Conger covers X from San Francisco.
Jan. 7, 2025, 7:14 p.m. ET
Meta would like to introduce its next fact-checker — the one who will spot falsehoods, pen convincing corrections and warn others about misleading content.
It’s you.
Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, announced Tuesday that he was ending much of the company’s moderation efforts, like third-party fact-checking and content restrictions. Instead, he said, the company will turn over fact-checking duties to everyday users under a model called Community Notes, which was popularized by X and lets users leave a fact-check or correction on a social media post.
The announcement signals the end of an era in content moderation and an embrace of looser guidelines that even Mr. Zuckerberg acknowledged would increase the amount of false and misleading content on the world’s largest social network.
“I think it’s going to be a spectacular failure,” said Alex Mahadevan, the director of a media literacy program at the Poynter Institute called MediaWise, who has studied Community Notes on X. “The platform now has no responsibility for really anything that’s said. They can offload responsibility onto the users themselves.”
Such a turn would have been unimaginable after the presidential elections in 2016 or even 2020, when social media companies saw themselves as reluctant warriors on the front lines of a misinformation war. Widespread falsehoods during the 2016 presidential election triggered public backlash and internal debate at social media companies over their role in spreading so-called “fake news.”
