Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced Facebook and Instagram will replace third-party fact checkers with a system in the style of X’s community notes. Video by Mark Zuckerberg via Storyful
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00:00Hey 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.
00:08I started building social media to give people a voice. I gave a speech at Georgetown five years ago about the importance of protecting free expression, and I still believe this today.
00:18But a lot has happened over the last several years. There's been widespread debate about potential harms from online content. Governments and legacy media have pushed to censor more and more.
00:29A lot of this is clearly political, but there's also a lot of legitimately bad stuff out there. Drugs, terrorism, child exploitation. These are things that we take very seriously and I want to make sure that we handle responsibly.
00:41So we built a lot of complex systems to moderate content. But the problem with complex systems is they make mistakes.
00:48Even if they accidentally censor just 1% of posts, that's millions of people. And we've reached a point where it's just too many mistakes and too much censorship.
00:58The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech.
01:04So we're going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies, and restoring free expression on our platforms.
01:13More specifically, here's what we're going to do.
01:16First, we're going to get rid of fact checkers and replace them with community notes, similar to X, starting in the US.
01:23After Trump first got elected in 2016, the legacy media wrote nonstop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy.
01:31We tried in good faith to address those concerns without becoming the arbiters of truth.
01:36But the fact checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they've created, especially in the US.
01:43So over the next couple of months, we're going to phase in a more comprehensive community notes system.
01:50Second, 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.
02:00What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas.
02:08And it's gone too far.
02:10So I want to make sure that people can share their beliefs.