Meta has announced it will end its third party fact-checking programme, saying that the current approach to content moderation has ‘gone too far’.

The social media giant said that the systems put in place to manage content across its platforms has become overly complex, resulting in too many mistakes which curb free expression and frustrate users, with many finding themselves in ‘Facebook jail’ over what the company called harmless content.

Moving forward, the firm’s independent fact checking programme, launched in 2016, will be replaced with a Community Notes programme, with Mark Zuckerberg noting the approach will be similar to that seen on X.

According to Meta, this will empower communities to decide when posts are potentially misleading and need more context, and allow people across a diverse range of perspectives to decide what sort of context could be helpful for other users to see.

“We think this could be a better way of achieving our original intention of providing people with information about what they’re seeing – and one that’s less prone to bias,” wrote Meta’s newly installed chief global affairs officer, Joel Kaplan.

Once the new programme is up and running, Meta said that it will not write Community Notes or decide which ones show up, relying on contributing users to write and rate them instead, and will require agreement between people with a range of perspectives to help prevent biased ratings, as on X.

As well as an end to centralised fact checking controls, the plan also includes the use of less obtrusive labels to indicate when there is additional information, ending the use of full screen interstitial warnings.

At the same time, Meta intends to strip back a number of restrictions on topics like immigration, gender identity and gender that are the subject of frequent political discourse and debate, saying that the current rules have been ‘over-enforced’, resulting in censorship.

“It’s not right that things can be said on TV or the floor of Congress, but not on our platforms,” wrote Kaplan.

Until now, Meta has used automated systems to scan for all policy violations, but according to the firm this has resulted in too many mistakes and too much content being incorrectly censored.

The firm will now rely on users reporting an issue before taking any action, and use these automated systems only for tackling illegal and high-severity violations, like terrorism, child sexual exploitation, drugs, fraud and scams.

Another significant change, especially in light of the imminent return of Trump to the White House, is the return of civic content to Meta’s platforms, including posts about elections, politics and social issues, which were phased out in 2021.

According to the tech firm, this will allow for a more personalised approach for users keen to see more political content across Facebook, Instagram and Threads.

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The company said it will begin treating political content the same way it does other content, by ranking, showing, and recommending political feeds based on signals users send when interacting with them, arguing that this will allow users more control over the content they see.

In a video accompanying the announcement, Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg said: “We’re going to work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world going after American companies and pushing to censor more.

“Europe has an ever increasing number of laws institutionalising censorship, and making it difficult to build anything innovative there.”