Hey everyone. I want to talk about something important today because it's time to get back to our roots around free expression on Facebook and Instagram.

Free expression. That's a phrase the bosses of some of the big social media companies are using a lot, including Meta's CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who you just heard there.

That clip was from a video shared in January,

announcing some major changes to the way the social media giant will label and moderate some of

its posts in the US. His argument, that fact-checking has become too politically biased,

undermining trust rather than creating it, because in his words,

there are too many mistakes, and that leads to what he calls censorship.

Instead, meta seems to be following X's lead and pivoting to community notes, where users,

rather than professional fact-checkers and experts decide what's accurate.

So does that mean more free speech and fewer mistakes?

Or are users at greater risk of being misled by false posts?

To answer those questions, I've tracked down former insiders from the social media companies,

users themselves and social psychologists.

I'm Marianna Spring, and for BBC Trending, this is Can Community Notes Clean Up Your Feed?

Welcome to the documentary from the BBC World Service. I'm Mariana Spring from BBC Trending,

and this is, can community notes clean up your feed?

The way it's now perceived is, well, if you have fact-checkers, you can't have community notes.

And if you have community notes, well, fact-checkers are useless.

And that's kind of tough.

This is Sam Freeman.

Mark Zuckerberg used to be his boss, when he worked on protecting user safety at Meta, which owns Instagram and Facebook.

He started working at the company in 2020, just as COVID-19 swept the world.

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