Your Instagram and Facebook feeds are about to become a lot more like X

Millions of people have abandoned X. Elon Musk has reshaped the platform in his image by making it more open to politically divisive views on key elements of the culture wars.

More than a million people every day have been joining Threads, the Twitter-alike owned by Meta, which is the parent company of Instagram and Facebook. They’ve sought a refuge from Musk’s sometimes angry, shouty social network.

But a policy change could soon leave those users disappointed.

Meta, which has more than three billion users across its family of apps, will replace third-party content moderation with a crowdsourced alternative.

The reasoning Meta has given is that it believes between 10 and 20 per cent of the content moderation decisions it makes may have been in error. What this means for Meta’s 40,000 content moderators is not known.

But it does mean that users will be able to add comments and notes to posts that might be false or misleading.

The decision, which will initially be enacted for US users, will make Instagram, Facebook and Meta’s other apps look an awful lot like X, which has had Community Notes – a crowdsourced fact-checking system – since 2021. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg even gave a shout-out to X and Community Notes when unveiling plans for his own system.

If it’s anything like the X version, people in the US will be given the option to sign up to a feature on Meta allowing them to append comments to posts they view as wrong or questionable in terms of their claims. Currently Meta uses news organisations or other third-party groups to check posts.

Even if people in the UK can’t yet sign up to the new system, they are likely to be able to see community notes in their feeds.

“It’s a worrying turn of events,” said Carolina Are, a content moderation researcher at the Centre for Digital Citizens at Northumbria University. “It feels like Meta and Zuckerberg have zero personality. They stole the idea from Snapchat for stories, and they stole the idea of Reels from TikTok. Now they are copying the worst possible platform, X, for Community Notes.”

Academic research has suggested that Community Notes are not effective at limiting the spread of misinformation on social media because they are often appended to posts long after they are initially shared to make a difference, and because they can often be weaponised. “The scrapping of fact-checking all together seems like more of a move to essentially save money in what actually needs a lot more investment,” said Are.

What users will see is more “borderline” content, reckons Matteo Nebbiai, a researcher in technology and the political economy at King’s College London. “This means that users will probably see more ‘bad stuff’ such as hate speech, especially if connected to political topics,” he explained. Meta has said it will redouble its efforts to tackle illegal content, such as terrorism or images of child abuse, outside the Community Notes approach.

Zuckerberg has presented the decision as an attempt to be more efficient and to retool a system of content moderation that despite 40,000 staff, was often ineffective or malfunctioning. That’s because the number of staff, while large, is still small compared with the number of posts. And decreeing what is and isn’t acceptable content on politically-contentious topics is tricky. 

He also noted it’s a return to a commitment to free expression that had lost its way over years of political pressure and wrangling to appeal to users.

He said: “After Trump first got elected in 2016, the legacy media wrote non-stop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy.

“We tried in good faith to address those concerns without becoming the arbiters of truth.

“But the fact-checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created, particularly in the US.”

But Zuckerberg admitted: “It means that we’re going to catch less bad stuff, but we’ll also reduce the number of innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally take down.”

For sceptics, it’s a convenient flip back across the political divide to appease incoming president Donald Trump. “Zuckerberg is changing Meta’s policy to send the message that Meta is now aligned with the Trump-Musk view of social media,” said Nebbiai.

Such a move was always likely. Trump has shown he is willing to take revenge against enemies, and could have viewed Meta’s interventionist content moderation system as unduly punitive to conservative voices, despite an absence of evidence.

It’s not the only way Meta and Zuckerberg, who met Trump after his election win, are seemingly trying to appease the incoming President. Meta donated $1m to support the inauguration and has appointed several Trump allies to high-ranking positions. Former UK deputy PM Nick Clegg also stood down from his role as president of global affairs at Meta.

Zuckerberg added that fact-checkers have become seen as political actors engaged in censorship – something that’s anathema to Trump and the Republican party in the United States.

Trump’s own social network, Truth Social, takes a hands-off approach to contentious but legal content.

The Real Facebook Oversight Board, an independent watchdog that was established in response to Meta setting up its own Oversight Board, said: “All who are concerned about a slide into techno authoritarianism should be deeply alarmed by this action, as Meta further degrades the integrity of its platforms.

“Just days ahead of the inauguration, Meta – like Twitter –is retooling to allow the Trump administration’s propaganda and obfuscations to flow unchecked.”