Meta to End Fact-Checking Program in Shift Ahead of Trump Term: Live Updates
January 7, 2025
Live Updates: Meta to End Fact-Checking Program in Shift Ahead of Trump Term
The social networking giant will stop using third-party fact checkers on Facebook, Threads and Instagram and instead rely on users to add notes to posts. It is likely to please President-elect Trump and his allies.
Meta on Tuesday announced changes to its content moderation practices that would effectively end a fact-checking program instituted to curtail the spread of misinformation across its social media apps. Instead of using news organizations and other third-party groups, Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and Threads, will rely on users to add notes to posts that may contain false or misleading information.
The reversal of the years-old policy is a stark sign of how the company is repositioning itself for the Trump presidency in the weeks before it begins. Meta described the changes with the language of a mea culpa: Joel Kaplan, Meta’s newly installed global policy chief, said in a statement that the company wanted to “undo the mission creep that has made our rules too restrictive and too prone to over-enforcement.”
Meta’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, 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,” Mr. 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.”
Mr. 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.”
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 Joel Kaplan, Meta’s newly installed global policy chief, on “Fox & Friends,” a favorite show of President-elect Donald J. Trump. Mr. Kaplan told the hosts of the morning show popular with conservatives that there was “too much political bias” in the fact-checking program.
Here’s what to know:
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Currying favor: Ever since Mr. Trump’s victory in November, few big companies have worked as overtly to curry favor with the president-elect. In a series of announcements during the presidential transition period, Meta has sharply shifted its strategy in response to what Mr. Zuckerberg called a “cultural tipping point” marked by the election.
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Inspired by X: Mr. Zuckerberg seems to be taking a page from Mr. Trump’s favorite tech mogul, Elon Musk. Mr. Musk has relied on Community Notes to flag misleading posts on X. Since taking over the social network, Mr. Musk, a major Trump donor, has increasingly positioned X as the platform behind the new Trump presidency.
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Conservatives cheer: Meta’s move on Tuesday morning elated conservative allies of Mr. Trump, many of whom have disliked Meta’s practice of adding disclaimers or warnings to questionable or false posts. Mr. Trump has long railed against Mr. Zuckerberg, claiming the fact-checking feature treated posts by conservative users unfairly.
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Eased restrictions: Among the changes announced on Tuesday are the removal of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender identity that Mr. Zuckerberg said were “out of touch with mainstream discourse.” The company’s trust and safety and content moderation teams will be moved away from California, with the U.S. content review shifting to Texas, in a move that would “help remove the concern that biased employees are overly censoring content,” Mr. Zuckerberg added.
President-elect Donald J. Trump and his allies have vowed to squash an online “censorship cartel” of social media firms that they say targets conservatives.
Already, the president-elect’s newly chosen regulators at the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Trade Commission have outlined plans to stop social media platforms like Facebook and YouTube from removing content the companies deem offensive — and punish advertisers that leave less restrictive platforms like X in protest of the lack of moderation.
“The censorship and advertising boycott cartel must end now!” Elon Musk, the owner of X, whom Mr. Trump has appointed to cut the federal budget, posted on his site last month.
In Europe, social media companies face the opposite problem. There, regulators accuse the platforms of being too lax about the information they host, including allowing posts that stoked political violence in Britain and spread hate in Germany and France.
Mr. Trump’s return to the White House is expected to widen the speech divide that has long existed between the United States and Europe, setting up parallel regulatory systems that tech policy experts say could influence elections, public health and public discourse. That’s putting social media companies in the middle of a global tug of war over how to police content on their sites.
“What you are seeing is conflicting laws emerging from the world’s democracies, and consumers in the end suffer,” said Kate Klonick, an associate professor of property and internet law at St. John’s University School of Law. The result could be a fractured internet experience where people see different content based on the laws where they live, she said.
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Members of Congress are starting to react to Meta’s announcement. Senator Rand Paul, a Republican from Kentucky, said in a post on X this morning that the company “finally admits to censoring speech,” calling the move to end its fact-checking program “a huge win for free speech.”
The Oversight Board, an independent organization funded by Meta to adjudicate content moderation cases, welcomed the announcement, saying Meta’s fact-checking methods have been criticized and perceived as politically biased. It said in a statement that the board “looks forward to engaging with Meta to ensure the development of a scalable solution that fosters trust, protects free expression and amplifies user voice on its platforms.”
Meta’s decision could set up a conflict with regulators in Europe, where there has been a sustained effort to get social media platforms to do more to combat disinformation and harmful content. Meta is already facing multiple E.U. investigations, including one for failure to address disinformation and deceptive advertising. Under a law called the Digital Services Act intended to force companies to police their platforms more aggressively, Meta could face fines of up to 6 percent of global revenue.
This was an announcement focused on one person above all others. Zuckerberg, wearing one of his now trademark chain necklaces, used language in his video that seemed targeted directly at Trump. He criticized the “legacy media” and said he would work with the incoming president to protect American companies from speech restrictions pushed by foreign governments. And it was announced on Fox News.
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Taking a step back here, Zuckerberg’s decision fits in with the broader political repositioning among Silicon Valley leadership over the last two months. Tech companies and billionaires are reacting to Trump’s 2024 win far differently than they did in 2016. Few companies have been as aggressive — or unsubtle — as Meta.
Zuckerberg isn’t only responding to what happened in November. As Mike Isaac and I reported this fall, the tech billionaire genuinely was undergoing some personal political transformation even before Trump won, feeling regretful about some of his prior political and philanthropic work.
Mark Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post Monday that Meta had added Dana White, the chief executive of Ultimate Fighting Championship, and two other executives to its board.
Meta is adding Mr. White, a longtime friend of President-elect Donald J. Trump, to the social media company’s leadership amid a series of moves to strengthen its ties to the incoming administration. Last week, the company shook up the top of its policy team, appointing a longtime executive known for his Republican ties as head of global policy. Meta has also donated $1 million to Mr. Trump’s inaugural fund.
In recent years, Mr. White and Mr. Zuckerberg, the Meta chief executive, have bonded over their passion for professional fighting, including mixed martial arts, which Mr. Zuckerberg took up in 2022.
“Dana is the President and CEO of UFC, and he has built it into one of the most valuable, fastest growing, and most popular sports enterprises in the world,” Mr. Zuckerberg said in his post. “I’ve admired him as an entrepreneur and his ability to build such a beloved brand.”
In 2023, Mr. White attempted to broker a cage match between Mr. Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of X, Tesla and SpaceX. Mr. Musk, who has become a close ally of Mr. Trump, eventually backed out of the battle, citing an old injury. He claimed Mr. Zuckerberg was at fault for not making himself available to fight later on.
Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, created three new board seats for the appointments, bringing the total number to 13. Mr. Zuckerberg said the company had also added John Elkann, the chief executive of Exor, a European-based holding company that controls Jeep and Ferrari, and Charlie Songhurst, a tech investor who previously worked at Microsoft and has recently advised Meta on artificial intelligence projects.
“We have massive opportunities ahead in A.I., wearables, and the future of social media, and our board will help us achieve our vision,” Mr. Zuckerberg wrote.
Meta in recent years has begun to manufacture wearable technology, like gaming headsets and sunglasses equipped with cameras. It is also competing in a global A.I. race, launching its own generative system with “open source” code so that it can be freely copied, modified and reused by anyone.
Meta has faced harsh Republican criticism of its content moderation on its social media platforms, which Mr. Trump and others argue amounts to censorship of conservative voices. Some of the people the president-elect has tapped to regulate the tech and other industries have promised to crack down as a result.
In recent weeks, Mr. Zuckerberg met with Mr. Trump at Mar-a-Lago, during which the tech executive congratulated the president-elect on winning the election.
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