Mark Zuckerberg says Meta will axe ‘politically biased’ fact-checkers

"The fact-checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created."

In a video shared to Facebook, the tech billionaire said it was "time to get back to our roots around free expression."

“After Trump first got elected in 2016, the legacy media wrote non-stop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy,” he said.

“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.”

Meta, which owns social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, says the 'community notes' style system has seen success on X.

In a blog post from Meta's head of global affairs, Joel Kaplan, said that their current content filters had "gone too far."

"As well-intentioned as many of these efforts have been, they have expanded over time to the point where we are making too many mistakes, frustrating our users and too often getting in the way of the free expression we set out to enable," Kaplan wrote

"Too much harmless content gets censored, too many people find themselves wrongly locked up in “Facebook jail,” and we are often too slow to respond when they do."

The 'community notes' system is set to be phased into the US first. It is still unclear whether the changes will be introduced elsewhere, per BBC.

"We're getting rid of a number of restrictions on topics like immigration, gender identity and gender that are the subject of frequent political discourse and debate," the blog post added.

"It's not right that things can be said on TV or the floor of Congress, but not on our platforms".

The changes to the platform come ahead of Donald Trump's inauguration on 20 January.

Back in March 2024, he called Facebook "an enemy of the people".