New updates from January 7: Trump refuses to rule out force to take Greenland and Panama Canal; Meta ends fact-checking

Hey, everyone, I want to talk about something important today because it’s time to get back to our roots around free expression on Facebook and Instagram. First, we’re going to get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with community notes, similar to X, starting in the US. But the fact-checkers have just been too politically biassed, and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created, especially in the US. Second, we’re going to simplify our content policies and get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse.

We used to have filters that scanned for any policy violation. Now we’re going to focus those filters on tackling illegal and high-severity violations. The problem is that the filters make mistakes, and they take down a lot of content that they shouldn’t. So by dialling them back, we’re going to dramatically reduce the amount of censorship on our platforms.

The reality is that this is a trade-off. It means we’re going to catch less bad stuff, but we’ll also reduce the number of innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally take down. But the bottom line is that 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.