Meta Ditches Fact-Checkers Ahead of Trump’s Second Term

Meta announced Tuesday that it is abandoning its third-party fact-checking programs on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads and replacing its army of paid moderators with a Community Notes model that mimics X’s much-maligned volunteer program, which allows users to publicly flag content they believe to be incorrect or misleading.

In a blog post announcing the news, Meta’s newly appointed chief global affairs officer, Joel Kaplan, said the decision was taken to allow more topics to be openly discussed on the company’s platforms. The change will first impact the company’s moderation in the US.

“We will allow more speech by lifting restrictions on some topics that are part of mainstream discourse and focusing our enforcement on illegal and high-severity violations,” Kaplan said, though he did not detail what topics these new rules would cover.

In a video accompanying the blog post, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the new policies would see more political content returning to people’s feeds as well as posts on other issues that have inflamed the culture wars in the US in recent years.

“We’re going to simplify our content policies and get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse,” Zuckerberg said.

Meta has significantly rolled back fact-checking and decided to get rid of the content moderation policies it had put in place in the wake of revelations in 2016 about influence operations conducted on its platforms, which were designed to sway elections and in some case promote violence and even genocide.

Ahead of last year’s high-profile elections across the globe, Meta was criticized for taking a hands-off approach to content moderation related to those votes.

Echoing comments Zuckerberg made last year, Kaplan said that Meta’s content moderation policies had been put in place not to protect users but “partly in response to societal and political pressure to moderate content.”

Kaplan also blasted fact-checking experts for their “biases and perspectives” which led to over-moderation: “Over time we ended up with too much content being fact-checked that people would understand to be legitimate political speech and debate,” Kaplan wrote.

WIRED reported last year, however, that dangerous content like medical misinformation has flourished on the platform while groups like anti-government militias have utilized Facebook to recruit new members.

Zuckerberg meanwhile blamed the “legacy media” for forcing Facebook to implement content moderation policies in the wake of the 2016 election. “After Trump first got elected in 2016 the legacy media wrote nonstop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy,” Zuckerberg said. “We tried, in good faith, to address those concerns without becoming arbiters of truth, but the fact-checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created.”

Meta’s decision could have a direct negative impact on media organizations in the US who partner with the company for fact-checking, including Reuters and USA Today. Meta’s fact-checking partners did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Facebook has already contributed to the demise of journalism and this will be the final nail in the coffin,” Nina Jankowicz, the former Biden administration disinformation czar who is now CEO of the American Sunlight Project, said in an emailed statement. “Newsrooms get grants from Facebook to provide fact-checks. That money allows them to do other journalism. Zuckerberg’s announcement is a full bending of the knee to Trump and an attempt to catch up to Musk in his race to the bottom. Fact-checking was not a panacea to disinformation on Facebook but it was an important part of moderation.”

In what he attempted to frame as a bid to remove bias, Zuckerberg said Meta’s in-house trust and safety team would be moving from California to Texas, which is also now home to X’s headquarters. “As we work to promote free expression, I think that will help us build trust to do this work in places where there is less concern about the bias of our teams,” Zuckerberg said.

X alternative BlueSky announced in August last year that it was also considering introducing a Community Notes–style feature to specifically address the issue of “dog-piling and other forms of harassment.” The feature has yet to be introduced.

Like X, the Meta approach will utilize an army of volunteers who will write community notes on posts, but in order for those posts to be visible to all users, other volunteers will need to vote to approve the note. “Just like they do on X, Community Notes will require agreement between people with a range of perspectives to help prevent biased ratings,” Kaplan wrote.

“We’ve seen this approach work on X—where they empower their community to decide when posts are potentially misleading and need more context, and people across a diverse range of perspectives decide what sort of context is helpful for other users to see,” Kaplan wrote.

But Community Notes on X, first introduced as BirdWatch in 2021, has been shown repeatedly to not only fail to stem the tide of disinformation and hate speech that has come to dominate the platform, but is in fact adding to the problem.

Zuckerberg, who recently visited Trump at Mar-a-Lago and brought the president-elect a pair of the company’s new AR glasses, also slammed lawmakers in Europe and Latin America for overzealous censorship and stifling free speech.

“We’re going to work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world that are going after American companies and pushing to censor more,” Zuckerberg said.

But critics of Zuckerberg and Meta were quick to slam these policy changes. “Meta’s announcement today is a retreat from any sane and safe approach to content moderation,” the Real Facebook Oversight Board, an activist group established in response to the establishment of Meta’s own oversight board, said in a statement.

“Censorship is a manufactured crisis, political pandering to signal that Meta’s platforms are open for business to far-right propaganda. Twitter’s shift from fact-checking has turned the platform into a cesspool; Zuckerberg is joining them in a race to the bottom.”