Meta on Tuesday announced a set of changes to its content moderation practices that would effectively put an end to its longstanding fact-checking program, a policy instituted to curtail the spread of misinformation across its social media apps.
The reversal of the years-old policy is a stark sign of how the company is repositioning itself for the Trump era. Meta described the changes with the language of a mea culpa, saying that the company had strayed too far from its values over the prior decade.
“We want to undo the mission creep that has made our rules too restrictive and too prone to over-enforcement,” Joel Kaplan, Meta’s newly installed global policy chief, said in a statement.
Instead of using news organizations and other third-party groups, Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and Threads, will rely on users to add notes or corrections to posts that may contain false or misleading information.
Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, said in a video that the new protocol, which will begin in the United States in the coming months, is similar to the one used by X, called Community Notes.
“It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression,” Zuckerberg said. The company’s current fact-checking system, he added, had “reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship.”
Zuckerberg conceded that there would be more “bad stuff” on the platform as a result of the decision. “The reality is that this is a trade-off,” he said. “It means that we’re going to catch less bad stuff, but we’ll also reduce the number of innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally take down.”
Elon Musk has relied on Community Notes to flag misleading posts on X. Since taking over the social network, Musk, a major Trump donor, has increasingly positioned X as the platform behind the new Trump presidency.
Meta’s move is likely to please the administration of President-elect Donald Trump and its conservative allies, many of whom have disliked Meta’s practice of adding disclaimers or warnings to questionable or false posts. Trump has long railed against Zuckerberg, claiming the fact-checking feature treated posts by conservative users unfairly.
Since Trump won a second term in November, Meta has moved swiftly to try to repair the strained relationships he and his company have with conservatives.
Zuckerberg noted that “recent elections” felt like a “cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech.”
In late November, Zuckerberg dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, where he also met with his secretary of state pick, Marco Rubio. Meta donated $1 million to support Trump’s inauguration in December. Last week, Zuckerberg elevated Kaplan, a longtime conservative and the highest-ranking Meta executive closest to the Republican Party, to the company’s most senior policy role. And on Monday, Zuckerberg announced that Dana White, the head of the Ultimate Fighting Championship and a close ally of Trump’s, would join Meta’s board.
Meta executives recently gave a heads-up to Trump officials about the change in policy, according to a person with knowledge of the conversations who spoke on condition of anonymity. The fact-checking announcement coincided with an appearance by Kaplan on “Fox & Friends,” a favorite show of Trump. He told the hosts of the morning show popular with conservatives that there was “too much political bias” in the fact-checking program.
The change brings an end to a practice the company started eight years ago, in the weeks after Trump’s election in 2016. At the time, Facebook was under fire for the unchecked dissemination of misinformation spread across its network, including posts from foreign governments angling to sow discord among the American public.
As a result of enormous public pressure, Zuckerberg turned to outside organizations like The Associated Press, ABC News and the fact-checking site Snopes, along with other global organizations vetted by the International Fact-Checking Network, to comb over potentially false or misleading posts on Facebook and Instagram and rule whether they needed to be annotated or removed.
Among the changes, Zuckerberg said, will be to “remove restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are out of touch with mainstream discourse.” He also said that the trust and safety and content moderation teams would be moved from California, with the U.S. content review shifting to Texas. That would “help remove the concern than biased employees are overly censoring content,” he added.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
First Published: January 7, 2025, 1:54 p.m.
Updated: January 7, 2025, 11:53 p.m.
