SAN FRANCISCO/NEW YORK – As part of an overhaul of its content moderation policies announced on Tuesday, Meta said it would once again phase in political content into Facebook, Instagram and Threads to meet the demand for political content.

The company is scrapping its third-party fact-checking program, replacing it with a Community Notes program written by users similar to the model used by Elon Musk's social media platform X.

Meta will take a "more personalized approach" going forward and recommend more political content to people based on personalized signals and would expand the options people have to control how much content they see, the company said on Tuesday.

The amount of political content on Meta's apps has been reduced since 2021, Meta noted in a blog post, based on user feedback that they wanted to see less of this content in their feeds.

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Meta's early 2024 decision to stop proactively recommending political content to users on Instagram and Threads was met with both user and creator backlash.

Creators were particularly concerned about how Meta would determine which content was political. They were also worried about how these changes would limit their reach and ability to reach new audiences, which would have a direct impact on their ability to grow their personal brand and, therefore, their income. 

Users felt that Meta's changes to how political content was being surfaced were suppressing their voice across social media, according to a report by TechCrunch.

Fact-checking with Community Notes

Starting in the United States, Meta will end its fact-checking program with independent third parties.

The company said it decided to end the program because expert fact checkers had their own biases and too much content ended up being fact checked. Instead, it will pivot to a Community Notes model.

"We've seen this approach work on X, where they empower their community to decide when posts are potentially misleading and need more context," Meta's Chief Global Affairs Officer Joel Kaplan said in a blog post.

The social media company also said it plans to allow "more speech" by lifting some restrictions on some topics that are part of mainstream discussion in order to focus on illegal and "high severity violations" such as terrorism, child sexual exploitation and drugs.

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Meta said its approach of building complex systems to manage content on its platforms had "gone too far," made "too many mistakes" and censored too much content.

Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged that the changes are in part sparked by Donald Trump's presidential election.