On January 7th, 2025, Meta announced they will be making major changes to content moderation policies on all their owned platforms, including Facebook: ending third-party fact-checking in the US in lieu of a new "Community Notes" feature, lifting restrictions on certain content, and allowing more political content in people's feeds, in order to "return to [their] fundamental commitment to free expression."

The announcement has fuelled a lot of discussion about what this means for Facebook and Meta platforms, especially as 48% of users in the US regularly get their news from Facebook and the last decade has shown that effectively moderating and managing misinformation online continues to stump the major social media network. 

If Facebook has been a goldmine for OSINT evidence in the past, these new changes a likely to continue to surface an abundance of personal, incriminating evidence on the platform for investigators to find. With the implementation of new "free expression" policies and Community Notes features, it can be reasoned that Facebook will be hosting and promoting more controversial, potentially incriminating content on the platform than ever. 

Why Is There So Much Evidence on Facebook?

Prior to the moderation policies announced in 2025, Facebook was still a goldmine for investigators looking to find incriminating evidence. Whether it's inadvertently posting photos of a murder weapon, confusing consumers with trademark violations, or logging intense workouts after an injury claim, it's estimated that social media evidence was a key factor in up to 500,000 litigation cases last year. 

But why is Facebook an especially great source of evidence? Here are just a few reasons:

1. It's the most used social media network

Facebook is the world's most popular social media platform with over 3.07 billion monthly active users. It is the third most visited website globally, only after Google and Youtube. 

2. It's one of the most used and effective advertising networks 

Facebook is also home to over 10 million active advertisers, with 93% of marketers using Facebook advertising regularly. As perhaps one of the mot effective advertising networks, Facebook ads reach a reported 62.2% of the US population. 

3. The platform makes it easy to push scams and misinformation

In 2019, congressional hearings about Facebook's ad fact-checking policy showed just how easy it is to push outright and intentionally false information in advertisements.

In the hearings, Representative Ocasio-Cortez questioned Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on the company’s policies regarding false political advertisements, asking specifically whether she could run false ads asserting that certain Republicans had voted for the Green New Deal (when in fact that had not) as a means of targeting those candidates in the primaries. Zuckerberg ultimately answered that he wasn’t certain but that “I think probably” so.

The next day an advertisement asserting that Senator Lindsay Graham supported the Green New Deal appeared on Facebook, which included an altered video clip of the senator stating he believed in the proposal, when in fact he did not.

All of these factors coalesce to make Facebook an incredibly robust network, full of very personal information, including photos, videos, app usage, and group-affiliations and more for billions of users, businesses, and advertisers. 

Capturing Facebook Evidence Before it Disappears

The biggest challenge in capturing evidence on Facebook is it's ephemerality — content can be posted one minute and deleted the next. 

This should raise flags for any investigator or attorney, as crucial evidence for a case can disappear (or be edited) without notice. It goes without saying that once the content that might be vital to proving your case is gone, it can be nearly impossible to prove that it ever existed in the first place. That means you need to capture evidence as soon as you find it. But that's where things get a bit complicated.

If you've tried to capture evidence on social media before, you likely tried screenshotting the post in question, only to realize later that some comments or important context was missing. And if you tried to use that screenshot in court without important metadata or digital signatures, you would have no way to prove that the screenshot was authentic — that is unedited or altered, making it inadmissible. 

Thankfully, if you need to capture evidentiary-quality, admissible, authentic evidence from Facebook quickly, there are some great third-party tools that can help. If you're in the market for a tool of this type, here's what you need to look for to make sure you're getting the right software for the job:

• It is accessible in your browser (a plug-in), so you can grab the evidence immediately when you find it
• It captures entire pages including all expanded comments, reactions, emojis, etc.
• It downloads multimedia content like videos automatically
• It captures all the metadata and HTML source code
• It captures quickly, it shouldn't take more than a few clicks to capture a page
• It preserves evidence with a SHA256 digital signature and timestamp to ensure authenticity 
• It can export evidence as it appeared natively, in-context, and in evidentiary-quality

With Meta’s new content moderation policies being implemented soon, investigators and legal professionals need to be able to capture evidence quickly, before it disappears. It's not unreasonable to assume that with more free expression on the platform, social media evidence from Facebook could gain prominence in litigation, highlighting the importance of having the right tools ready to capture evidence at a moment's notice.