Has the battle for content moderation, long one of the thorniest problems facing social media companies and other online platforms, finally been lost? A new move by Meta suggests so.
“We’re going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies and restoring free expression on our platforms,” said Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a video statement published to . This means, he explained, getting rid of fact-checkers and replacing them with community notes, similar to the way X, formerly Twitter, has dealt with content moderation. The change will first take place in the US, said Zuckerberg – suggesting that other countries could soon follow suit.
Tech platforms have traditionally tried to enforce their content rules with a combination of automated and human review, with varying success. The issues with content moderation are multifarious, but include defining exactly what the rules should be, with the risk of annoying people of different political views, and managing the sheer scale of messages – Meta has more than 3 billion users across its family of apps, which include Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.
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Adopting crowdsourced community notes alongside content moderators – Meta had according to testimony in front of the US Congress in January 2024 – is a bold move. But early research into X’s community notes indicates they may not be particularly effective.
A found that introducing community notes to X, then known as Twitter, in 2021 didn’t reduce engagement with misinformation on the platform. The research suggests the way the system worked was too slow to stem the spread of false information across the platform. However, other studies have indicated that community notes can stop harmful content spreading too quickly. , another study analysed 285,000 notes appended to tweets, mostly from 2023, and found that the additional context can reduce the number of retweets of any post by half.
Social media researchers are already sounding a note of caution. “Meta’s decision will only have negative consequences for the global public,” says at City St George’s, University of London. “Whilst there are some benefits to having community notes, they do not serve as a replacement for actual fact-checking. They should be seen as an additional layer of protection against misinformation, not the only layer.”
But with Meta getting rid of independent fact-checking organisations it seems the wisdom of the crowd – or lack thereof – will prevail. “Community notes are rife with abuse, especially by those who want to push a particular political agenda,” says Buckley.
The idea that X, which has haemorrhaged users under Elon Musk’s ownership, is being held up as an example to follow also worries Buckley. “Over the past year, we have seen X devolve into a misinformation hellscape with its sole reliance on community notes,” he says. “Meta’s various platforms will now likely succumb to the same fate.”
That Zuckerberg’s announcement comes less than two weeks before Donald Trump returns to the White House as US president has also raised eyebrows. “This year already feels like a tipping point for social media policy,” says at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. “If we would have acted in 2016, it would have been much easier than it is now to regulate online platforms in a democratic way.”
Lorenz-Spreen says this is part of a wider change by social media platforms to try to appease a broader shift in political views. The rise of populism has pushed conversations rightwards, with right-wing, populist parties seeing success in elections around the world. Once-fashionable diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) business practices are increasingly denigrated, with companies such as and dropping their diversity pledges.
Zuckerberg nodded to this trend in his video, announcing plans to move some content moderation teams from California to Texas, in other words from a left-leaning state to a firmly Republican one. “The political climate has changed and the – mostly US-based – companies will adapt and change their policies in a direction that benefits Trump,” says Lorenz-Spreen.
Article amended on 8 January 2025
We have clarified the changes announced by Meta.
