Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images Meta is ending its third-party fact checks and making sweeping changes to its content moderation policies. Meta is making sweeping changes to its content moderation policies, including abandoning third-party fact checks in favor of crowd-sourced “Community Notes” and loosening restrictions on topics like immigration and gender identity. Under the updated Hateful Conduct policy, for example, calling gay and trans people “mentally ill” is now allowed, while an explicit ban on referring to women as “household objects” has been removed. New policy lead Joel Kaplan said that in pursuit of “More Speech and Fewer Mistakes,” Meta will focus more on preventing over-enforcement of its content policies and less on mediating potentially harmful but technically legal discussions on its platform. It comes just two weeks before President-elect Donald Trump is set to return to the White House, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement appealed to many of the incoming administration’s talking points. Zuckerberg has promised to move US content review from California to Texas, where he says there’s “less concern about the bias of our teams,” and said Meta would work with Trump to “push back on governments around the world that are going after American companies and pushing to censor more.”