Digital hate speech campaigners hit back at Meta’s plan to ditch fact-checkers

Several organisations tackling hate speech online have criticised new plans announced by Meta to axe its third-party fact-checking programme.

Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg said on Tuesday that, starting in the US, the company will replace its fact-checking process with a community notes model similar to that of X.

The social media giant said that it will allow more speech by “lifting restrictions on some topics that are part of mainstream discourse”, instead focusing its enforcement practices on “illegal and high-severity violations.”

The company claims that expert fact-checkers on the platform have been influenced by personal biases, which it says has resulted in legitimate political speech and debate being fact checked, with its system then attaching “intrusive labels and reduced distribution”.

Speaking about how the company has developed “increasingly complex systems” to manage content across its platforms, partly in response to “societal and political pressure”, Zuckerberg said: “The problem with complex systems, is they make mistakes. Even if they accidentally censor just one per cent of posts, that’s millions of people. And we’ve reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship.”

Independent non-profit organisation CyberWell, which focuses on combatting online antisemitism and Holocaust denial on social media, criticised the move, describing it as an exchange of human bias in a small and contained group of fact-checkers for human bias at scale.

Tal-Or Cohen Montemayor, founder and executive director of the online antisemitism watchdog, said that the plans represent a “systematic lowering of the bar” on how Meta intends to enforce its community standards, adding that the organisation is “deeply concerned” given mounting evidence of how online hate speech, incendiary content, and harassment lead to real-world harm including hate crimes, terror attacks, and child suicide.

“This change particularly undermines the safety of all marginalised communities, including the Jewish community which is currently experiencing one of the worst onslaughts of widespread Jew-hatred in both online and offline spaces,” he said. “For the Jewish community this means that Meta is making it easier for antisemitism to flourish online.”

The founder said that the move would likely lead to an uptick in hate-posting, harassment and even a migration of white supremacists and extreme racists onto Meta’s platforms “much like during the period immediately following the Twitter acquisition.”

Montemayor added that while Meta’s existing fact-checking system is “ineffective and unscalable”, the only way to prevent censorship and data manipulation by any government or corporation would be to institute “legal requirements and reforms on BigTech that enforce social media reform and transparency requirements.”

Campaign group Global Witness also hit back at the plans, describing Zuckerberg’s announcement as a “blatant attempt to cosy up to the incoming Trump administration – with harmful implications”.

“Claiming to avoid “censorship” is a political move to avoid taking responsibility for hate and disinformation that platforms encourage and facilitate,” Ava Lee, from Global Witness, told the BBC.

Mark Jones, partner at Payne Hicks Beach, agreed that that the move would likely increase the amount of misinformation and disinformation online.

“Delegating fact-checking to other users, who may not know the truth behind a story or post, increases the risks of misleading, harmful and just plain wrong content being available online,” continued Jones. “For now, Meta has no plans to end fact-checking in the EU. But is it only a matter of time before they seek to?”