The co-chairwoman of Meta’s oversight board said she is “very concerned” by the social media company’s decision to scrap its top-down fact-checking system and instead opt for X’s community notes approach to combat disinformation and hate speech.

Helle Thorning-Schmidt, also a former prime minister of Denmark, told BBC News that although she thinks it is good for Facebook and Instagram users to have more of a say in determining a post’s accuracy, there was concern for how this would affect minority groups such as the LGBT community.

“We are seeing many instances where hate speech can lead to real-life harm, so we will be watching that space very carefully,” Thorning-Schmidt said in the interview.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Tuesday that after nearly nine years, the social media company was abandoning its independent fact-checking in an effort to ensure users’ free speech rights are not being infriged upon.

“We built a lot of complex systems to moderate content, but the problem with complex systems is they make mistakes,” Zuckerberg said. “Even if they accidentally censor just 1% of posts, that’s millions of people, and we’ve reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship.”

But Thorning-Schmidt now worries that Meta’s oversight board, an independent oversight committee funded by Meta, could be axed next. Just last week, the creator of the board and former president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, said he was leaving the company. 

Thorning-Schmidt said the board’s presence is crucial after Meta’s decision to put the responsibility on users to moderate posts.

“That’s why it is good we have an oversight board that can discuss this in a transparent way with Meta,” she said.

She also acknowledged that President-elect Donald Trump’s victory may have influenced Zuckerberg’s decision as he competes with X CEO Elon Musk to win favor with Trump.

“I think they’re trying to find a way of existing in this new environment, and that’s why I think this is a time where the work of the oversight board is so important,” Thorning-Schmidt said, “because what we will try to ensure in all of these changes that are coming is that there is transparency,  that we can debate this openly, that we strike the right balance between free speech and other human rights, and that we engage the global community and use us in this conversation.”

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Jewish advocacy organization Cyberwell has also raised concerns with Meta’s decision to ditch fact-checkers.

“This change means one thing, very in line with the trend of both the quantity and quality of content that we have seen on X since Musk acquired Twitter – more hate speech, more politicized content, more silos and less effective responses from the platforms,” Tal-Or Cohen Montemayor, the executive director and founder of the nonprofit organization, said in a statement.