• Mark Zuckerberg's plan to replace fact checkers with "community notes" is a familiar one.
• A similar system of community moderation is already in place on Elon Musk's X.
• On X, community notes let users add context to posts. Meta has said it seems to work well.

Mark Zuckerberg says Meta will use "community notes" to moderate content on its platforms like Facebook and Instagram — but what exactly does that mean, and how has it worked on other platforms?

Meta said the feature would function much like it does on Elon Musk's platform, where certain contributors can add context to posts they think are misleading or need clarification. This type of user-generated moderation would largely replace Meta's human fact-checkers.

"We've seen this approach work on X — where they empower their community to decide when posts are potentially misleading and need more context and people across a diverse range of perspectives decide what sort of context is helpful for other users to see," Meta said in its announcement Tuesday.

Musk, who has a sometimes-tense relationship with Zuckerberg, appeared to approve of the move, posting "This is cool" on top of a news article about the changes at Meta.

So, will it be cool for Meta and its users? Here's a primer on "community notes" — how it came to be, and how it's been working so far on X:

How the 'community notes' feature was born

The idea of "community notes" first came about at Twitter in 2019, when a team of developers at the company, now called X, theorized that a crowdsourcing model could solve the main problems with content moderation. Keith Coleman, X's vice president of product who helped create the feature, told Asterisk magazine about its genesis in an interview this past November.

Coleman told the outlet that X's previous fact-checking procedures, run by human moderators, had three main problems: dedicated staff couldn't fact-check claims in users' posts fast enough, there were too many posts to monitor, and the general public didn't trust a Big Tech company to decide what was or wasn't misleading.

Coleman told Asterisk that his team developed a few prototypes and settled on one that allowed users to submit notes that could show up on a post.

"The idea was that if the notes were reasonable, people who saw the post would just read the notes and could come to their own conclusion," he said.

And in January 2021, the company launched a pilot program of the feature, then called "Birdwatch," just weeks after the January 6 Capitol riot. On its first day, the pilot program had 500 contributors.

Coleman told the outlet that for the first year or so of the pilot program — which showed community notes not directly on users' posts but on a separate "Birdwatch" website — the product was very basic, but over time, it evolved and performed much better than expected.

When Musk took over the platform in 2022, he expanded the program beyond the US, renamed it "community notes," and allowed more users to become contributors.

Around the same time, he disassembled Twitter's trust and safety team, undid many of the platform's safety policies, and lowered the guardrails on content moderation. Musk said in 2022 that the community notes tool had "incredible potential for improving information accuracy."

It's unclear how many users participate in community notes contributors. It's one of the platform's main sources of content moderation. X didn't immediately respond to a request for comment from BI.

How the community notes feature works on X

The community notes feature is set to roll out on Meta's Instagram, Facebook, and Threads platforms over the next few months, the company said in a statement shared with BI. Meta said the feature on its platforms would be similar to X's.

On X, community notes act as a crowd-sourced way for users themselves to moderate content without the company directly overseeing that process.

A select group of users who sign up as "contributors" can write a note adding context to any post that could be misleading or contain misinformation.

Then, other contributors can rate that note as helpful or not. Once enough contributors from different points of view vote on the note as helpful, then a public note gets added underneath the post in question.

For instance, here's an example of a community note attached to a recent X post:

X has made the complex ranking algorithm behind the feature transparent and open-source, and users can view it online and download the latest data.

X says that community notes "do not represent X's viewpoint and cannot be edited or modified by our teams," adding that a community-flagged post is only removed if it violates X's rules, terms of service, or privacy policies.

Similar to X, Meta said its community notes will be written and rated by contributing users. It said the company will not write notes or decide which ones show up. Also like X, Meta said that its community notes "will require agreement between people with a range of perspectives to help prevent biased ratings."

Facebook, Instagram, and Threads users can sign up now to be among the first contributors to the new tool.

"As we make the transition, we will get rid of our fact-checking control, stop demoting fact-checked content and, instead of overlaying full-screen interstitial warnings you have to click through before you can even see the post, we will use a much less obtrusive label indicating that there is additional information for those who want to see it," Joel Kaplan, Meta's chief global affairs officer, said in Tuesday's statement.

Potential pros and cons of community notes

One possible issue with the feature is that by the time a note gets added to a potentially misleading post, the post may have already been widely viewed — spreading misinformation before it can be tamped down.

Another issue is that for a note to be added, contributors from across the political spectrum need to agree that a post is problematic or misleading, and in today's polarized political environment, concurring on facts has sometimes become increasingly difficult.

One possible advantage to the feature, though, is that the general public may be more likely to trust a consensus from their peers rather than an assessment handed down by a major corporation.

Maarten Schenk, cofounder and chief technology officer of Lead Stories, a fact-checking outlet, told the Poynter Institute that one benefit of X's community notes is that it doesn't use patronizing language.

"It avoids accusations or loaded language like 'This is false,'" Schenk told Poynter. "That feels very aggressive to a user."

And community notes can help combat misinformation in some ways. For example, researchers at the University of California, San Diego's Qualcomm Institute found in an April 2024 study that the X feature helped offset false health information in posts related to COVID-19. They also helped add accurate context.

In announcing the move, Zuckerberg said Meta's past content moderation practices have resulted in "too many mistakes" and "too much censorship." He said the new feature will prioritize free speech and help restore free expression on Meta's platforms.

Both President-elect Donald Trump and Musk have championed the cause of free speech online, railed against content moderation as politically biased censorship, and criticized Zuckerberg for his role overseeing the public square of social media.

One key person appeared pleased with the change: Trump said Tuesday that Zuckerberg had "probably" made the changes in response to previous threats issued by the president-elect.

While Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk never did face off in that cage match, "Uncle Elon" has bested Zuck in the political arena, becoming one of the most powerful unelected figures in modern US history. Now, in hopes of forging a friendlier relationship with the Trump administration a second time around, Zuckerberg seems to be following a new mantra: If you can't beat Elon, be him.

On Tuesday, Meta announced it would end third-party fact-checking and replace it with a more hands-off content-moderation policy in which users police one another through community notes — just like Musk's X. In a video announcing the changes, Zuckerberg said that "governments and legacy media" had pushed for more censorship in recent years, and that Meta had decided its "complex systems" had "too many mistakes and too much censorship." "The recent elections," the Meta CEO added, "also feel like a cultural tipping point towards, once again, prioritizing speech." His language would have sounded natural coming out of the mouth of Musk, who shared Zuckerberg's video on X and dubbed Meta's move "cool."

Community notes is only the latest page Zuckerberg has taken from his billionaire rival's playbook. Whether conducting mass layoffs or removing the guardrails to social media or joining forces with Musk against their shared competitor OpenAI or spending time at Mar-a-Lago, Zuckerberg has been following Musk's lead more often.

This isn't the first time Zuckerberg, who has helmed Facebook since he was 19, has reinvented himself. From the brash, hoodie-wearing Harvard dropout in Facebook's early days to the suit-wearing, meat-smoking, Silicon Valley nice guy in the years after the company went public to the hardened, martial-arts-practicing "wartime"-mode Zuck who emerged in the wake of the most turbulent period in company history, Zuckerberg has fashioned several personas that approximate what his company most needs him to be at the time. In 2025, don't let his longer hair, oversize T-shirts, and statement jewelry fool you. The persona Mark Zuckerberg has taken on to ensure Meta's success as his historical adversary Donald Trump returns to the White House acts a lot like Donald Trump's right-hand man, Elon Musk.

When Musk bought Twitter in 2022, he shaved content moderation to bare bones in the name of free speech and cut more than 80% of its staff, sending shockwaves through the tech world. Many speculated that Twitter would crack under the pressure, and die. When, despite some hiccups, the platform continued to function largely as normal, Zuckerberg, like several other tech CEOs, applauded Musk for making Twitter "leaner" (doing so on the Musk superfan Lex Fridman's podcast). Meta also laid off 11,000 workers days after Musk took over Twitter, and Zuckerberg then dubbed 2023 "the year of efficiency" at Meta, cutting another 10,000 people. Zuckerberg now also plans to move trust-and-safety workers from California to Texas, following in step with Musk, who has relocated X from San Francisco to Texas, where he has also located Starlink and The Boring Company.

And as Zuckerberg stayed quieter throughout the 2024 presidential election after Meta took heat for misinformation in 2016 and 2020, Musk did the opposite. The world's richest man appeared onstage alongside Trump, backed Trump with more than $250 million, and posted to X incessantly in support of the now president-elect. Musk has again come out on top, as he now sits at the pinnacle of political influence and is poised to radically reshape government spending as he and Vivek Ramaswamy spearhead the Department of Government Efficiency. Big Tech's other power players who want a favorable relationship with Trump are left to follow in his path.

Since November, Apple's Tim Cook, Open AI's Sam Altman, and Amazon have each donated to Trump's inaugural fund. Zuckerberg has done that and more, including visiting Mar-a-Lago to have dinner with the president-elect; naming UFC CEO Dana White, a close Trump ally, to Meta's board; and promoting Joel Kaplan, a longtime Republican lobbyist, to chief global affairs officer. (On Tuesday, Kaplan gave an interview on "Fox & Friends" to promote the company's content-moderation changes.)

All of this is meant to quell a once adversarial relationship between Zuckerberg and Trump, who had threatened to imprison Zuckerberg if his social sites interfered with the 2024 election and years ago accused Facebook of being "anti-Trump" and colluding against him (Zuckerberg pushed back against such claims).

As my colleague Peter Kafka wrote of the community notes news: "There's no way to see Zuckerberg's moves as anything other than a straightforward attempt to please Trump and the incoming president's conservative allies, who have often complained that Zuckerberg's properties were biased against them." Even Trump said Tuesday that Meta was "probably" responding to his own past threats against Zuck by pivoting.

The very fact-checkers who will soon be dismissed by Meta began with a program in December 2016, after Facebook faced harsh criticism for its role in spreading misinformation in Trump's first election a month prior. Meta actively worked to downplay political content following the January 6, 2021, insurrection, and it suspended Trump from Facebook and Instagram (Meta lifted the suspension in early 2023, saying the public should be able to access what politicians are saying; the move came shortly after Musk allowed Trump back on Twitter). When Meta launched Threads, its own Twitter competitor, in 2023, the Instagram head, Adam Mosseri, said the new app would not encourage breaking news and politics posts. But Musk, who has rebuilt X in his own image to favor conservative and far-right accounts, has found that a social-media site can win when embracing the president. On Tuesday, Meta also said it would reverse course and stop downgrading political content, and start phasing politics back into users' feeds. (A Meta spokesperson referred to past public statements but did not provide new comment for this story.)

Early research on X's community notes shows the move has led to mixed results when it comes to combating misinformation. But changes at X have certainly proved a mammoth victory for Musk, whose wealth has grown by an estimated $200 billion since the election. As he's molded himself more in Uncle Elon's image, Nephew Zuck may also find himself in Trump's favor.

Amanda Hoover is a senior correspondent at Business Insider covering the tech industry. She writes about the biggest tech companies and trends.

• Meta said Tuesday it plans to drop third-party fact-checkers in favor of a community notes feature.
• Meta CMO Alex Schultz told Business Insider that the election of Donald Trump to the presidency influenced the shift.
• He also said a change in how Americans view censorship and content moderation played a role.

After Meta announced it was ditching fact checkers, Alex Schultz, the company's chief marketing officer, said in an interview with Business Insider on Tuesday that the election of Donald Trump as president influenced the decision.

"Look, we're going to adjust to any administration and we always do and that, I think, is appropriate," Schultz said at CES 2025 in Las Vegas on Tuesday, adding, "We've worked with the Biden administration through its term. We'll work with the Trump administration through its term. Elections have consequences."

Earlier on Tuesday, Meta announced it would stop using third-party fact-checkers in favor of user-generated community notes.

The company also said it was moving some of its content moderation teams from California, which typically votes Democratic, to Texas, which typically votes Republican. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the move would "help remove the concern that biased employees are overly censoring content."

Schultz added that in addition to the incoming administration playing a role, the timing of the decision was also influenced by a shift in "the vibes in America."

Schultz said there's a change in how Americans broadly view censorship, free speech, and content moderation, which he said was signaled by the results of the election.

"It's a big, big shift," he said. "So I think, yeah, we're responding to that at this time because that's the logical time to do it."

Zuckerberg said the new community notes feature would be similar to the one used on Elon Musk's X, formerly Twitter, which allows users to add notes to posts that potentially contain misinformation or are missing context.

Schultz told BI the announced changes also bring Zuckerberg "back to the core of what he cares about."

"I think fundamentally he's been pushed into a place that was further than he wanted to be in terms of censorship and in content moderation," Schultz said, adding Zuckerberg was "taking advantage of the moment to do what he thinks is right."

Meta's content moderation policies have been scrutinized for years. Four years ago, Facebook banned President Donald Trump from the platform for policy violations, sparking the ire of Republicans, who have accused the site of silencing conservative views.

Schultz said he thought those complaints of bias were fair and that Meta could not find fact-checking organizations on the political right at the same rate as left-leaning ones. He said community notes on X have been more successful at getting people from across the political spectrum to contribute.

However, he said Meta will take a different approach than X when it comes to relations with the brands that advertise on their platform.

"We're not going out there denigrating our advertisers and putting them in terrible positions," he said, alluding to critical comments Musk has made about some of X's advertisers. X sued a group of advertisers in August, accusing them of antitrust violations.

Schultz said Facebook would maintain its brand safety tools that allow companies some control over the kinds of content their ads appear next to.

He also said the primary concerns for their big advertisers are around hate speech and adult nudity, rather than content addressed by fact-checkers, and that the brand safety tools will remain focused on those areas.

"We're going to focus on precision and not be taking down things we shouldn't be taking down," he said.

• Meta announced Tuesday it's doing away with third-party fact-checking in favor of community notes.
• Several lawmakers told BI the move is an indication Mark Zuckerberg is catering to Trump.
• Some business leaders praised Meta for the change while others expressed concern.

Meta is carrying out the biggest overhaul to its content moderation system in years.

The company announced on Tuesday that it's replacing third-party fact-checking program with user-generated community notes, like those on Elon Musk's X, formerly Twitter.

In another page from Musk's playbook, Meta said it's moving some teams — specifically its trust and safety teams, responsible for writing the company's content policies and reviewing content — out of California into Texas and other locations in the US.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the decision was about getting "back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies, and restoring free expression on our platforms."

Democrats: Zuckerberg's sucking up to Trump

Democratic lawmakers told BI at the US Capitol on Tuesday that they saw the move as a sign that Zuckerberg is trying to appease President-elect Donald Trump ahead of his return to the Oval Office.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York said Zuckerberg was "kissing Trump's ass" in making the change.

"I think that Mark Zuckerberg is trying to follow in Elon's footsteps, which means that actually, they're going to use this guise of free speech to actually suppress critics of Trump and critics of themselves," Ocasio-Cortez said. "That's why they're moving to this system. It's a model for their own self-aggrandizement."

Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts told BI that Big Tech CEOs "want a government that works for them, and they're making clear that sucking up to Donald Trump is one of the ways they think they'll get that."

Rep. Maxwell Frost of Florida said the change appeared to be symptomatic of authoritarianism.

"It's not just about the legislation they pass, or what they push, but it creates this environment of fear and self-censorship, and a place where companies will begin to do the things he wants them to do without him forcing them to do it," he said, referring to Trump.

"They're surrendering essentially to implied threats by the government, which is very dangerous," Rep. Jerry Nadler of New York said.

Trump himself told reporters Tuesday that he believed Zuckerberg's changes at Meta were "probably" in response to previous threats Trump has made to the Meta chief executive, including to jail him.

Republicans: A good sign, but we'll see

Republicans offered more mixed reactions to Zuckerberg's decision, with some expressing skepticism while others saw it as a win. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas told reporters at the Capitol that what the Meta CEO said "sounds good" but that the "proof will be in the pudding."

He also said he saw Zuckerberg's move as the product of both political positioning and a sincere evolution in his thinking.

"I've had multiple conversations with Mark on this topic," Cruz said, "and I will say, he had previously expressed an interest in protecting free speech."

Sen. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, meanwhile, called the decision a "ploy to avoid being regulated." For several years, she's been pushing a bill to increase social media protections for kids.

"Can any of us assume Zuckerberg won't return to his old tricks?" wrote Sen. Mike Lee of Utah on X.

Republican Rep. Randy Weber of Texas, meanwhile, wrote on X that it was "a great day for freedom of speech."

"It seems like Meta is finally taking a page from Elon Musk's playbook & letting Americans make decisions for themselves. It's about time Meta owned up to censoring Americans," he added.

Tech and business leaders react

In the tech and business world, some of Zuck's peers congratulated him and Meta on the move.

Musk said in separate tweets that the decision was "cool" and "awesome."

X CEO Linda Yaccarino called it "a smart move by Zuck."

"Fact-checking and moderation doesn't belong in the hands of a few select gatekeepers who can easily inject their bias into decisions. It's a democratic process that belongs in the hands of many," she wrote.

David Marcus, the former Meta exec in charge of the company's Libra cryptocurrency project, said the change marked a "massive step in the right direction towards free expression for Meta."

Other tech and business figures were more skeptical of the decision.

Yoel Roth, the former head of Twitter's trust and safety department, said, "Genuinely baffled by the unempirical assertion that Community Notes 'works.' Does it? How do Meta know? The best available research is pretty mixed on this point. And as they go all-in on an unproven concept, will Meta commit to publicly releasing data so people can actually study this?"

And in response to a message from Zuckerberg saying Meta will work with Trump to "push back against foreign governments going after American companies to censor more," Mark Cuban wrote on Bluesky: "Translation: Americans are going to see Tariffs on products from countries you believe censor Meta services as a means of pressuring them into removing any restrictions that impact your profitability in those countries. Also: You'll have carte blanche to take posts that no longer have restrictions, making them a more explicit representation, and train your AI Models."

Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

• Meta's content-moderation changes aim to appease Donald Trump and his conservative allies.
• Mark Zuckerberg's moves follow efforts to align with Trump, including meetings and policy shifts.
• Meta's new approach includes ending third-party fact-checking and demoting its Trust and Safety team.

Sometimes the obvious thing is the obvious thing.

Which is to say: You can make pro and con arguments for many of the massive changes Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced about the way his company is going to moderate — or not moderate — content. It's a complicated topic.

But the most important takeaway is that all of Tuesday's news has been rolled out specifically for Donald Trump, and the new political reign that officially kicks into gear on January 20.

That includes the language Zuckerberg and his company are using to describe the changes — like when Zuckerberg criticizes "legacy media" and declares that "the recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point" in a video posted Tuesday morning.

It includes the venue Meta used to announce the changes — Fox News, Trump's favorite TV channel. And, of course, the changes themselves. We'll get to those in a second.

But first, some crucial context: Tuesday's news follows a series of moves Zuckerberg and Meta have made to make nice with Trump and Republicans, which began before November's election.

A reminder of that timeline:

• In July, Zuckerberg praised Trump as a "badass" after the GOP leader survived an assassination attempt.
• In August, Zuckerberg sent Republican Rep. Jim Jordan a letter in which he acknowledged moderation mistakes in the past.
• In November, Zuckerberg traveled to Mar-a-Lago for a postelection audience with Trump, then pledged $1 million to Trump's inaugural committee.
• Last week, Zuckerberg announced that he was replacing his head of policy: Nick Clegg, a former British politician, was out, replaced by Joel Kaplan, a longtime Republican.
• On Monday, Zuckerberg announced that he was adding Dana White, the CEO of the Ultimate Fighting Championship and a prominent Trump backer, to his board of directors.

Add it all up and there's no way to see Zuckerberg's moves as anything other than a straightforward attempt to please Trump and the incoming president's conservative allies, who have often complained that Zuckerberg's properties were biased against them. It's crystal clear.

As far as the changes themselves: It's entirely possible that some of the stuff Zuckerberg and his team announced Tuesday reflects what Zuckerberg actually believes. (I've asked Meta PR whether Zuckerberg wants to expand on his comments.)

Figuring out the best way to moderate — or not moderate — giant platforms that depend on free contributions from their users has bedeviled all the Big Tech companies for years. And Zuckerberg has never seemed comfortable with the various moderation layers and rules his company has added over time.*

He has also been signaling that he's particularly unhappy about the way the company responded to criticism and regulation following the 2016 election and subsequent revelations like the Cambridge Analytica data breach.

So getting rid of third-party fact-checking of controversial posts in favor of the "Community Notes" system Elon Musk's Twitter/X uses might very well be what Zuckerberg thinks makes sense. It certainly fits a Silicon Valley ethos that's much more comfortable using a combination of users and software to make decisions about what people see on those platforms, rather than asking executives to take responsibility for those calls.

The same goes for the demotion of Meta's Trust and Safety team — which is most definitely what Zuckerberg intends by moving those operations from California to Texas, which, at a minimum, is an attrition play. Zuckerberg has long talked about wanting those roles to eventually become automated, and in the meantime, hiring humans to do that work has been difficult, messy, or worse. Simply doing less of it is one way to get at the problem. (Worth noting: In 2023, the Meta investor and board member Marc Andreessen described Trust and Safety operations as part of "The Enemy" he wanted tech to fight back against.)

And figuring out how to run a platform that's based in America but subject to regulation around the world is a problem that all US tech companies struggle with. You can imagine the appeal of Zuckerberg's new approach — simply announcing that the rest of the world is anti-growth.

There will be a lot of devil in the details here. For instance, Zuckerberg certainly can't fully adopt Musk's next-to-anything-goes approach for his companies. Unlike Musk, he isn't in a position to scare off users and advertisers who want a clean, well-lit space.

But those are all details to hash out in the future. Tuesday's news is simple: It's Donald Trump's world, and Mark Zuckerberg is living in it.

*Criticisms of Meta/Facebook's moderation attempts don't come only from the right. I always remember the prime minister of Norway, among others, complaining when Facebook took down posts that used a Pulitzer Prize-winning photo from the Vietnam War — a move Facebook first defended, then reversed.

• Meta is moving its safety and content moderation teams from California to Texas and other states.
• CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the shifts would help address concerns of bias and over-censorship.
• Zuckerberg's Meta appears to be following the lead of Elon Musk's X in prioritizing free speech.

Mark Zuckerberg is moving Meta's platform security and content oversight teams out of California and shifting staff who review posts to Texas in a bid to combat concerns about liberal bias and over-censorship at his social-media empire.

The CEO of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Threads' parent company said on Tuesday that the moves would help return Meta to its "roots around free expression and giving people voice on our platforms."

Zuckerberg wrote that Meta would "move our trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California, and our US content review to Texas. This will help remove the concern that biased employees are overly censoring content."

California is widely recognized as a progressive state while Texas is traditionally conservative. Zuckerberg likely hopes that shifting oversight of his social networks to red states like Texas will help assuage claims that blue-state liberals are silencing conservative voices.

Meta's chief global affairs officer, Joel Kaplan, confirmed the changes in a blog post, writing that the company will relocate the teams "that write our content policies and review content out of California to Texas and other US locations."

He told Fox News' "Fox & Friends" on Tuesday that Meta was seeking to "rebalance" and "rebuild trust" among users who felt their perspectives were not wanted on its networks.

"We want to make sure that they understand that their views are welcome and that we're providing a space for them to come onto our platforms, engage, express themselves, engage in the important issues of the day or not in the important issues of the day and just whatever it is they want to talk about and share," Kaplan said.

Zuckerberg, Meta's billionaire cofounder and largest shareholder, also laid out plans to replace fact-checkers with Community Notes. He will also lift restrictions on topics like immigration and gender, ease overall censorship and instead focus on stopping illegal and severe policy violations, return civic content to users' feeds, and work with President-elect Trump to resist pressure from foreign governments to make US companies censor more.

Elon Musk, who acquired Twitter in late 2022 and rebranded it X, has made free expression a priority on his platform and spearheaded the use of Community Notes as a substitute for fact-checking and censorship.

Musk also shut X's headquarters in San Francisco last fall in favor of operating the company out of Bastrop, Texas.

• Meta is replacing third-party fact-checkers with community notes on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads.
• Mark Zuckerberg said Meta would roll out the notes, similar to X's, over the next few months.
• He added that Meta would bring back more political content to users' timelines.

Meta is replacing third-party fact-checkers with a community-notes model on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads.

Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, announced Tuesday that the company also planned to bring more political content back to the users' timelines and give them the option to customize how much of it they see.

The social media company is set to implement the sweeping content-moderation changes over the next few months.

"First, we are going to get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with community notes, similar to X, starting in the US," Zuckerberg said in a video message on Meta's blog.

Meta's recently appointed chief global-affairs officer, Joel Kaplan, said in the blog: "We've seen this approach work on X — where they empower their community to decide when posts are potentially misleading and need more context, and people across a diverse range of perspectives decide what sort of context is helpful for other users to see."

Kaplan said the approach was "less prone to bias."

The company will also "simplify" its content policies, Kaplan said, and "get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse."

Meta has faced scrutiny in the past for its approach to content moderation. In August, Zuckerberg sent a letter to Republican Rep. Jim Jordan, who chairs the House Judiciary Committee and has been a vocal critic of Zuckerberg. The Meta CEO said in his letter that the Biden administration repeatedly pressured the company in 2021 to remove COVID-19-related content and "expressed a lot of frustration" when the company did not agree.

X, called Twitter at the time, launched community notes in 2021, but the feature started appearing on more posts in 2023. Users can sign up to add context to posts that might contain misinformation or misleading content. Other users can rate how helpful they find the note.

Similar to X, Meta will let users contribute to the writing and rating of community notes, Kaplan said.

He added that Meta would move its trust and safety teams, which help moderate content, from California to Texas and other locations in the US.

The relocation of the trust and safety teams follows a move by X, which has its content-moderation headquarters in Austin. Last year, Joe Benarroch, X's head of business operations at the time, told Bloomberg that the platform was aiming to hire 100 full-time workers for the team.

Meta didn't immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.