In a post on the Meta website by chief global affairs officer Joel Kaplan and featuring a video by founder Mark Zuckerberg, the company confirmed that it would lift restrictions on some topics “that are part of mainstream discourse” and focus its enforcement efforts on “illegal and high-severity violations”.

The company’s fact checking programme will shift instead to a ‘community notes’ model whereby users agree on when posts are potentially misleading and need more context, in a similar model to that on rival social media platform X.

However, anti-disinformation campaigners criticised Meta’s decision, warning that it could lead to increased levels of misinformation on the firm’s social media platforms.

Community Notes will require agreement between people with a range of perspectives to help prevent biased ratings, according to Meta, and the company said it intended to be transparent about how different viewpoints inform the Notes displayed in our apps, and are working on the right way to share this information.

Meta will also adopt a more personalised approach to political content to allow people who wish to see more of it in their feeds to do so. The changes will roll out in the US over the next couple of months.

The blog post said: “In recent years we’ve developed increasingly complex systems to manage content across our platforms, partly in response to societal and political pressure to moderate content. This approach has gone too far.

“As well-intentioned as many of these efforts have been, they have expanded over time to the point where we are making too many mistakes, frustrating our users and too often getting in the way of the free expression we set out to enable. Too much harmless content gets censored, too many people find themselves wrongly locked up in ‘Facebook jail’, and we are often too slow to respond when they do. 

“We want to fix that and return to that fundamental commitment to free expression. Today, we’re making some changes to stay true to that ideal.”

The change in policy comes ahead of the inauguration of Donald Trump as president of the US, who has repeatedly criticised social media restrictions on speech.

Chris Morris, chief executive at fact-checking organisation Full Fact, said that Meta’s decision was a “backwards step that risks a chilling effect around the world”.

Morris added: “Like Meta, fact checkers are committed to promoting free speech based on good information without resorting to censorship. But locking fact checkers out of the conversation won’t help society to turn the tide on rapidly rising misinformation.

“Misinformation doesn’t respect borders, so European fact checkers will be closely examining this development to understand what it means for our shared information environment.”