Social-media firms decide content moderation is trending down

Zuckerberg, other social-media leaders long resisted content moderation beyond what was required legally

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responsible for the content they carry at the same time that the pendulum has been swinging the other way in the U.S. A spokesman for the European Commission said Tuesday it had no comment on Meta's announcement since the changes are initially happening only in the U.S.

The tech giants increasingly are opting to have their users handle fact-checking and moderating—an approach that frees the companies of the monetary and political costs of doing the jobs themselves, but also brings its own problems.

Zuckerberg tipped his hat to X on Tuesday. He said Meta is getting rid of fact-checkers and, starting in the U.S., replacing them with a so-called Community Notes system similar to one on Musk's X platform.

X's Community Notes feature relies on volunteers to write contextual notes to be added below misleading posts. X uses an algorithm to surface notes ranked as helpful by users who are assessed to have different points of view.

Researchers who have studied Community Notes say it has some benefits. Some people perceive fellow users as more trustworthy than professional fact-checkers, and some researchers have found that users are less likely to reshare content that gets a note.

However, researchers say the program has shortcomings and shouldn't replace professional fact-checkers. Notes take time to appear, sometimes after a post has gone viral. Users might try to band together to manipulate the rankings, and critics say the approach can fail on polarizing topics.

"Since it's based on finding consensus, it can't work at scale," said Alex Mahadevan, the director of MediaWise, a digital media literacy project at the Poynter Institute. The Poynter Institute runs PolitiFact, a fact-checking website that is one of Meta's partners.