MINNEAPOLIS — Meta, the company that owns Facebook and Instagram, is dropping its fact-checkers. 

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Wednesday morning the company will replace fact-checking with community notes.

“We’re going to get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with community notes similar to X starting in the U.S. We tried in good faith to address those concerns without becoming the arbiters of truth, but the fact checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created, especially in the U.S.,” Zuckerberg said.

University of Minnesota Silha Professor of Media Ethics and Law Jane Kirtley said the change is surprising, but not shocking.

“What it’s indicative of is the fact that we are drifting into a world where facts don’t really matter anymore, or what I think is even worse is the oligarchs that control social media are going to be the ones who decide what is true and what is false,” Kirtley said.

She said there are many theories about why social media owners are doing this, but she thinks a driving force for the change centers around the uncertainty about what the Trump administration will do in terms of its policies toward social media companies.

“I am not surprised to think this is being done in large part to try and dissuade President Trump’s Administration from taking any action against Meta,” she said. “It isn’t so much so content regulation under our current law, it’s more of a question of whether the Trump administration would use things like antitrust laws to try to affect his business model that is Mr. Zuckerberg’s business model.”

Kirtley said it’s up for debate whether or not the fact-checking function was useful, but she said ending the program is worrisome.

“My biggest concern is that without any kind of objective fact-checking, we’re going to be faced with a lot of misinformation and disinformation with nothing to counter it,” Kirtley said. “I personally think this is a terrible situation, very, very, dangerous for us as a society because it basically means we cannot have any kind of principled arguments on facts because we don’t even agree the facts.”

She said people’s respect for accuracy on social media varies. Kirtley said if you think what you see on social media is a source of truthful and accurate information you likely don’t think there’s a need for fact-checking. She said if you’re someone who thinks social media is a place where people can use and abuse information, you won’t like this change because of a lack of accountability.

“I think social media is a powerful force. It can be a great force for good. It can be a great force of what I consider to be evil, which is purposefully spreading misinformation,” she said.

Kirtley said some people use social media as their sole source of information.

“It doesn’t really matter what the so-called “mainstream media” are saying because they’re not going to see it, so the narrative that they’ve bought into is not going to be challenged and that is very dangerous,” Kirtley said.

Kirtley tries to remind her students there is no one source of truth. She said the key is to verifiable information from a variety of sources.

She said the decline of X, formerly Twitter, should serve as a cautionary tale. She wouldn’t be surprised if people started to leave Meta’s apps.

Kirtley said it’s hard to predict the impact this change will have on the younger generation’s involvement with these apps. She said she likes to think people care about accurate information regardless of political affiliation.