Over the next months, Meta will phase in a community notes system and simplify its policies on fact-checking.
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Meta will begin replacing its fact-checkers in the United States with a new "community notes" system similar to Elon Musk's platform X, the tech company's CEO announced.
Mark Zuckerberg said the move was about getting back to what he says are the company's "roots around free expression".
"The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritising speech," said Zuckerberg in a video message posted on Facebook, which is owned by Meta.
It comes following Donald Trump's US election win in November.
The US president-elect has been a critic of Facebook, however, calling it an "enemy of the people" last year and launching his own social media network, Truth Social, in 2022 after he was banned from other social media sites.
Zuckerberg spoke directly about the US election result, saying that Meta would work with Trump to push back on countries that are trying to rein in social media platforms.
He called out Europe for several laws that "make it difficult to build anything innovative there".
Europe's Digital Services Act (DSA) requires large tech companies such as Facebook and Instagram to counter illegal content online and mitigate against disinformation or election manipulation.
'Bad news for Meta users'
The changes to Meta's fact-checking system are so far limited to the US.
Zuckerberg said in the video message that Meta would get rid of fact-checkers starting in the US and replace them with "community notes" similar to X. There, users add context to misleading posts, with contributors rating whether the note is helpful or not.
The Meta CEO called fact-checkers "too politically biased," saying they "destroyed more trust than they created".
Yet X's Community Notes system has come under fire for not countering misinformation.
A report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) last year found that nearly three-quarters of accurate community notes on X were not being shown to all users.
Some misleading posts were also getting significantly more views than their community notes, the report found.
"You just have to see the celebration on the channels of well-known disinformation actors to know this is bad news for Meta users," Carlos Hernández-Echevarría, associate director of the independent Spanish fact-checking platform Maldita.es, told Euronews Next in an e-mail reacting to the news.
"And it's hard to overlook that the move comes after demands by the incoming US president Donald Trump and his advisor Elon Musk," he said.
He added that most importantly, fact-checkers did not "censor" anyone and "never ever asked Meta to remove anything legal".
Additional content moderation changes at Meta
The parent company of Facebook and Instagram will also simplify content policies and "get rid of a bunch of restrictions" on issues like immigration and gender, Zuckerberg said.
He added that Meta would dial back content filters that look for policy violations to focus only on "illegal and high severity violations".
Content filters will also need a higher confidence level before removing posts, he said, adding that Facebook and Instagram filters would catch "less bad stuff" yet reduce the accidental removal of posts.
This is not the first change Meta has made since Trump's election. Earlier this week, the company replaced its global affairs chief Nick Clegg with a former staffer of George W Bush, Joel Kaplan.
Commenting on the changes in an interview with the conservative US channel Fox News, Kaplan said that if you can say it on TV or the floor of Congress, "you certainly ought to be able to say it on Facebook and Instagram".
Meanwhile, on the European side, Hernández-Echevarría told Euronews Next that he expects EU laws to be enforced "regardless of the political pressure coming from the US".
"It's time for bravery and for not giving into intimidation," he said.
