The co-chairman of Meta’s supervisory board has said the company’s systems have become “too complex” after it decided to remove fact-checkers, while the chief executive of Elon Musk’s X welcomed the decision.
Helle Thorning-Schmidt, co-chair of the social media company’s supervisory board and former prime minister of Denmark, said she and the late president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, had agreed that “metasystems have been too complex,” adding that there had been “over-application”.
On Tuesday, Mark Zuckerberg made the surprise announcement that Facebook’s owner would stop using third-party fact-checkers to flag misleading content and would prefer notes from other users.
The 40-year-old billionaire said that starting in the US, Meta would “get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with X-like community notes,” as the company moves to prioritize free speech in the period leading up to Donald Trump’s return. to the White House.
The move came just days after Clegg, a former British deputy prime minister, left Meta after six years at the company, most recently as president of global affairs. In a farewell post on Facebook, Clegg said he was proud to have worked on “new forms of governance”.
While at Meta, he helped establish Facebook’s oversight board, an independent board that makes decisions on the social network’s moderation policies.
“We welcome investigating fact-checking. We welcome that message, looking at the complexity and perhaps over-enforcement,” Thorning-Schmidt told the BBC.
He added: “We are very concerned about gender rights, LGBTQ+ rights and trans rights on platforms because we are seeing a lot of cases where hate speech can cause harm in real life, so we will be watching that space with great attention.
Clegg will be replaced by Joel Kaplan, who previously served as deputy chief of staff for policy under former President George W. Bush, months after Trump’s election victory. Thorning-Schmidt said Clegg had “talked for a long time about leaving”.
His comments came as Linda Yaccarino, head of policy.
The move will see the social network move away from third-party fact-checkers to flag misleading content in favor of user-based notes. These have been widely implemented in recent years at X, formerly known as Twitter, particularly after Musk eliminated content moderators amid mass layoffs following his purchase of the company in 2022.
The decision by Meta, which also owns Instagram, WhatsApp and Threads, has been widely criticized by commentators and online safety activists, who said it would allow the flow of misinformation and harmful content.
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Yaccarino described Meta’s decision as “really exciting” during a question-and-answer session on stage at CES.
Describing X’s community notes as “good for the world,” Yaccarino said the system was “the most effective and fastest fact-checking system, without bias.”
She said: “Think of it as this global collective consciousness, holding each other accountable on a global scale in real time. And it couldn’t be more validating than seeing that Mark and Meta realized that.”
Yaccarino added: “Human behavior is inspired because when a post is noted, it is shared less dramatically, that’s the power of community notes.”
Wearing a rare Swiss watch, reportedly worth almost $900,000 (£722,607), Zuckerberg called Meta’s current moderation system “too politically biased”, although he admitted that changes to the way the company filters content would mean that “we are going to catch less bad things.” stuff”.