NEW YORK—Meta announced changes today to its content moderation policies, including that it’s replacing third-party fact checking with a Community Notes model that allows users to publicly flag content they believe to be incorrect or misleading. 

The following can be attributed to Katherine Glenn Bass, the Knight Institute’s research director:

“Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement today is a stark reminder that many of the biggest platforms we use to communicate about issues of public importance are owned by billionaires who are not accountable to us. Apart from the obvious effort to signal political allegiance, the impact of the announced changes will not be clear for some time. But if we have any hope of measuring or understanding what is happening on these platforms, we need strong protections for the independent researchers and journalists who study them, and better mechanisms for ensuring they can access platform data.”

In 2019, more than 200 researchers signed an open letter in support of the Knight Institute’s efforts to persuade Facebook to amend its terms of service to establish a “safe harbor” for public-interest journalism and research on the platform. Read more about that effort here.

For more information, contact: Adriana Lamirande, [email protected].