The co-chair of Meta’s oversight board said the company’s systems had become “too complex”, as the chief executive of Elon Musk’s X welcomed its decision to scrap factcheckers.
Helle Thorning-Schmidt, the co-chair of the social media company’s oversight board and the former prime minister of Denmark, has said she and the departed president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, had agreed “Meta systems have been too complex”, adding that there had been “over-enforcement”.
On Tuesday, Mark Zuckerberg made the surprise announcement that the Facebook owner would move away from using third-party checkers to flag misleading content in favour of notes from other users.
The 40-year-old billionaire said that, starting in the US, Meta would “get rid of factcheckers and replace them with community notes similar to X”, as the company moves to prioritise free speech in the run-up to Donald Trump’s return to the White House.
The move came only days after Clegg, Britain’s former deputy prime minister, left Meta after six years at the company, most recently in the role of president of global affairs. In a departure post on Facebook, Clegg said he was proud of having worked on “new forms of governance”.
During his time at Meta, he helped to establish the Facebook oversight board, an independent board that makes decisions on the social network’s moderation policies.
Thorning-Schmidt told the BBC: “There are huge problems in what Mark Zuckerberg has announced yesterday and that’s why the existence of an oversight board is so important. We welcome looking into factchecking. We welcome that message, looking into the complexity and perhaps over-enforcement.
“We’re very concerned about gender rights, LGBTQ+ rights, trans people’s rights on the platforms because we are seeing many instances where hate speech can lead to real-life harm, so we will be watching that space very carefully.”
Clegg will be replaced by Joel Kaplan, who previously served as the deputy chief of staff for policy under the former president George W Bush, months after Trump’s election victory. Thorning-Schmidt said Clegg had “talked about leaving for a long time”.
Her comments came as Linda Yaccarino, the head of X, welcomed Meta’s decision, saying “welcome to the party” during an appearance at the CES technology show in Las Vegas, hours after Zuckerberg announced the policy shift.
The change will mean the social network moves away from third-party checkers to flag misleading content in favour of user-based notes. These have been introduced widely in recent years on X, formerly known as Twitter, particularly after Musk cut content moderators amid mass sackings after he bought the company in 2022.
The decision by Meta, which also owns Instagram, WhatsApp and Threads, has been widely criticised by online safety campaigners and commentators, who said it would enable the flow of misinformation and harmful content.
Yaccarino described Meta’s decision as “really exciting” during an onstage question and answer session at CES. She said X’s community notes were “good for the world” and the system was “the most effective, fastest factchecking, without bias”.
She said: “Think about it as this global collective consciousness, keeping each other accountable at global scale in real time. And it couldn’t be more validating than to see that Mark and Meta realised that.”
Yaccarino added: “Human behaviour is inspired because when a post is noted, it’s dramatically shared less, so that’s the power of community notes.”
Wearing a rare Swiss watch, reportedly worth almost $900,000 (£722,607), Zuckerberg called Meta’s current moderation system “too politically biased”, although he admitted that changes to the way the company filtered content would mean “we’re going to catch less bad stuff”.
