On January 7, 2025, Meta announced sweeping changes to its content moderation policies, including the end of third-party fact-checking in the U.S., and rollbacks to its hate speech policy globally that remove protections for women, people of color, trans people, and more. In the absence of data from Meta, we decided to go straight to users to assess if and how harmful content is manifesting on Meta platforms in the wake of January rollbacks.
Tbf, having a central authority dictate the truth to you ain’t so great.
Neither is having classes of people who you aren’t allowed to offend.
I don’t think the phrase “third-party fact checkers” (plural) implies a central authority.
Facebook can’t stop you from offending people. What they can do is make it slightly more difficult by disallowing slurs, etc.