We're in for a scary year on socials in 2025.

I want to take you back to the peak COVID years.

Do you remember the vitriol being spewed online?

The harmful and incorrect information that was being published on social media?

How about the months leading up to the US election last year?

The commentary about a woman's right to make decisions about her own body, or the hate that rained down on the transgender community?

Much of this festered and grew on social media, and that was what life looked like with a fact-checking program in place monitoring Facebook and Instagram.

We're about to see what happens when you remove that protection. We're about to see hate and vitriol and incorrect information explode exponentially. Because on Wednesday evening (our time), CEO of Meta Mark Zuckerberg made a huge announcement.

Watch some of it below. Post continues.

In what can be described as Meta's biggest overhaul of its approach to managing content on its services in recent memory, Zuckerberg announced the scrapping of Meta's fact-checking program that's been in place since 2016. The company will no longer actively seek out hate speech or rule breaking of that kind, and instead wait for users to report issues before investigating.

Their automated systems will now only focus on removing "high-severity violations" like terrorism, child exploitation, scams and drugs.

He also confirmed Meta's platforms would be recommending more political content and would introduce a community notes section like Elon Musk's X, (where users can add caveats and context to contentious posts).

Zuckerberg justified the change by saying, "We've reached a point where it's just too many mistakes and too much censorship. It's time to get back to our roots around free expression".

"Meta's factcheckers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they've created," he added.

But he also admitted that the changes would mean "we're going to catch less bad stuff".

We're about to enter Donald Trump's second term as President of the United States — a leader who inflames damaging conversations on topics such as gender identity, women's rights and immigration on an international stage, with Zuckerberg even acknowledging the role the recent US elections had in his thinking, saying they "feel like a cultural tipping point, towards once again prioritising speech".

But this doesn't feel like freedom. Hate speech and free speech are not the same thing. This feels like the start of a major swing towards the further oppression and demonisation of minority voices.

Zuckerberg even said as much by admitting they were going to "get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse".

So are we saying that by allowing people to spew hatred against someone else's life choice — someone who identifies as transgender, for example, that we're making the world a better, freer place?

This change gives free rein to trolls to be homophobic, transphobic, sexist and racist with fellow users, (instead of professional fact-checkers), the only ones policing the content.

Social media is already a swarming mess of bullying, trolling and criticism, I shudder to think how much worse it's going to get with these guardrails removed.

The announcement has caught many by surprise, including some of the fact-checking partners formally funded by Meta that Zuckerberg accused of bias and censorship.

The head of the International Fact-Checking Network, Angie Drobnic Holan, challenged Zuckerberg's characterisation.

"Fact-checking journalism has never censored or removed posts; it's added information and context to controversial claims, and it's debunked hoax content and conspiracies," she said in a statement.

Kristin Roberts, Gannett Media's chief content officer, said "truth and facts serve everyone - not the right or the left - and that's what we will continue to deliver."

"We've learnt the news as everyone has today. It's a hard hit for the fact-checking community and journalism. We're assessing the situation," AFP said in a statement provided to Reuters.

It's wild to think that Zuckerberg thinks this job is better left in the hands of keyboard warriors.

Some publications have chosen to highlight how ridiculous that is with posts such as The Chaser's comical take:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by The Chaser (@chaserwar)

But I'm not laughing. This is scary stuff.

For now, Meta is planning the changes only for the US market, with no immediate plans to end its fact-checking program in places like the European Union which takes a more active approach to regulation of tech companies.

But what starts in America often ends up bleeding into the rest of the world.

We're about to watch social media become a whole lot more hateful in 2025 — if that is even possible.

-With AAP

Feature image: Instagram/@zuck