Meta on Tuesday announced a set of changes to its content moderation practices that would effectively put an end to its longstanding fact-checking programme, a policy instituted to curtail the spread of misinformation across its social media apps.

The reversal of the years-old policy is a stark sign of how the company is repositioning itself for the Trump era. Meta described the changes with the language of a mea culpa, saying that the company had strayed too far from its values over the prior decade.

“We want to undo the mission creep that has made our rules too restrictive and too prone to over-enforcement,” Joel Kaplan, Meta’s newly installed global policy chief, said in a statement. Instead of using news organisations and other third-party groups, Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and Threads, will rely on users to add notes or corrections to posts that may contain false or misleading information.

Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, said in a video that the new protocol, which will begin in the US, is similar to the one used by X, called Community Notes.

“It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression,” Zuckerberg said. The company’s current fact-checking system, he added, had “reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship”.

Zuckerberg noted that “recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritising speech”.

Elon Musk has relied on Community Notes to flag misleading posts on X. Since taking over the social network, Musk, a major Trump donor, has increasingly positioned X as the platform behind the new Trump presidency.

Meta’s move is likely to please the administration of President-elect Donald J. Trump and its conservative allies, many of whom have disliked Meta’s practice of adding disclaimers or warnings to questionable or false posts.

Since Trump won a second term in November, Meta has moved swiftly to try to repair the strained relationships he and his company have with conservatives. In late November, Zuckerberg dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, where he also met his secretary of state pick, Marco Rubio. Meta donated $1 million to support Trump’s inauguration in December.

New York Times News Service