On Tuesday, Meta announced significant reforms to its content review policy, ending its fact-checking program on FB and IG, and will adopt X's 'Community Notes' model to promote free speech. This move has garnered praise from Trump and Musk. However, some experts are concerned that misinformation may become more rampant. (Background context: Vitalik Buterin praised 'prediction markets' and 'community annotations' for their role in seeking truth, prompting a rare response from Musk.) (Supplementary background: Vitalik praised Twitter X's platform for being able to 'burst the echo chamber': community notes have high encrypted value) Social media giant Meta (formerly Facebook) announced on the 7th that it will end its third-party fact-checking program on platforms like Facebook and Instagram, and will follow X (formerly Twitter) in adopting the 'Community Notes' approach to innovate its content review policy, which has faced criticism from users, and return to Zuckerberg's original intention of promoting free speech. The policy to end fact-checking will begin implementation in the United States and will gradually expand globally. Meta CEO Zuckerberg stated in a video released on Tuesday: 'We will return to our roots, focus on reducing errors, simplifying our policies, and restoring free speech on our platform. More specifically, we will eliminate the fact-checking process and replace it with something similar to X's community annotations, starting in the United States.' Meta also stated in the announcement that it will remove restrictions on topics such as immigration, gender identity, and gender, enabling users to take a more personalized approach to political content. For less serious policy violations, the platform will rely on user reports before taking action, rather than broadly using automated systems to scan for all policy violations, focusing enforcement on 'illegal and highly serious violations', such as terrorism, child sexual exploitation, drugs, fraud, and scams. Meta emulating X's 'Community Notes' The 'Community Notes' feature being adopted by Meta was previously known as 'Birdwatch', which Twitter launched as a pilot project in January 2021. This feature aims to add contextual annotations to tweets through user collaboration to help verify information and combat misinformation. After Musk took over, he vigorously promoted the feature, and community notes have been praised by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik as well as the prediction market, gradually becoming two important social cognition technologies of the 2020s. Both pursue truth and democracy, built on open public participation rather than pre-selected elites. Meta stated that community notes enable the community to determine which posts may be misleading and need more background information, allowing people with different viewpoints to decide what background information may be helpful to other users. They believe this could be a better way to promote free speech and is less likely to produce bias. Kaplan explained to Fox News on Tuesday: 'Community notes are not about finding some so-called experts but rely on the community and the people on the platform to provide their own commentary on what they have read. If a note receives a 'widest user base', it can be attached to the content for others to see. We believe this is a better method than relying on those who bring their own biases into fact-checking programs.' Musk praised, Trump acknowledged 'progress' Regarding Meta learning from its own community notes feature, Musk tweeted support on Tuesday, stating 'this is cool'; X CEO Linda Yaccarino also wrote on X that community notes have achieved great success while keeping free speech sacred and inviolable. This is a wise move by Zuck, and I hope other platforms will follow suit since X has already demonstrated its powerful capabilities, it’s fantastic.' Additionally, the timing of this new policy, announced before Trump's inauguration on January 20, has led outsiders to believe that this policy is a further gesture of goodwill from Zuckerberg towards the Trump administration. His recent donation of $1 million to the Trump inauguration fund after visiting Mar-a-Lago has been interpreted as an attempt to mend the rift caused by the suspension of his Facebook account due to the 2021 Capitol riots. Trump, who has threatened revenge on Zuckerberg if he returns to the White House, praised Meta's outstanding performance on Fox News on Tuesday, claiming significant progress. When asked by reporters whether he believed Zuckerberg's latest move was a retaliatory threat towards Trump, he responded, 'It could be.' This is cool pic.twitter.com/kUkrvu6YKY — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 7, 2025 Will misinformation increase? However, Angie Drobnic Holan, director of the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN), warned that Meta's move may make it easier for misinformation and hate speech to spread online, potentially fueling hatred and violence against specific groups. Imran Ahmed, founder and CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), also expressed concerns about Meta's new policy, believing it represents a significant regression in online safety, transparency, and accountability... The impact of this new policy is worth our continued attention.