Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Tuesday that the social media company, which owns Facebook and Instagram, would stop working with third-party fact-checking organizations.
Repeating talking points long used by President-elect Donald Trump and his allies, in a video Zuckerberg said the company’s content moderation approach resulted too often in “censorship”.
“After Trump first got elected in 2016, the legacy media wrote nonstop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy. We tried in good faith to address those concerns without becoming the arbiters of truth,” Zuckerberg said. “But the fact checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created, especially in the U.S.”
Meta set up one of the most extensive partnerships with fact checkers after the 2016 presidential election, in which Russia spread false claims on Facebook and other online platforms. The company created what has become a standard for how tech platforms limit the spread of falsehoods and misleading information.
But the 2020 election and the COVID pandemic accelerated a backlash among conservatives who cast content moderation as a form of censorship. Facebook, along with Twitter and YouTube, banned Trump from their platforms after the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, but eventually allowed him to return ahead of his second run for office. In recent years, fact checkers, researchers of false narratives, and social media content moderation programs have become targets of Republican-led Congressional probes and legal challenges.
Zuckerberg said his views on content moderation have changed. Meta has made “too many mistakes” in how it applied its content policies, he said, and pointed to Trump’s election to a second term as “a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech.”
“So we are going to get back to our roots, focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies, and restoring free expression on our platforms,” he said.
Tech companies prepare for Trump 2.0
The move comes as Meta and other tech companies are working to smooth what has been a rocky relationship with Trump. The president-elect and other Republicans have long accused Silicon Valley of harboring anti-conservative bias that has muzzled their speech online. Trump has accused Zuckerberg personally of election interference and threatened him with life in prison.
Last week Meta elevated Joel Kaplan, a veteran company executive and Republican who once worked in George W. Bush’s White House, to head of global policy, replacing former British deputy prime minister Nick Clegg. On Monday, the company named Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO Dana White, a longtime supporter of Trump, to its board of directors.
Zuckerberg is among the tech titans who have traveled to Mar-a-Lago to meet with Trump since the election, and Meta donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund (Amazon and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman made similar pledges).
Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth College and longtime Meta observer, said it is distressing seeing business leaders “showing performative fealty” to the incoming administration.
“Meta clearly perceives a great deal of political risk of being targeted,” Nyhan said in an interview. “And the way Zuckerberg presented the announcements, and the timing, was obviously intended to play to a Republican audience.”
Some observers say Meta may be hoping for a lighter touch from regulators in the Trump administration.
Lina Khan, chair of the Federal Trade Commission, said in an interview with CNBC on Tuesday that she worries executives at Meta are seeking a “sweetheart deal” in the Trump White House.
A sweeping antitrust case against Meta brought by the FTC and attorneys general from 48 states and territories during Trump’s first term is set to go to trial in April. In a recent court filing, government lawyers wrote Mark Zuckerberg is expected to be among the first witnesses called to the stand.
“Well, look, I can’t predict what future people in my position are going to do. It is true that the FTC has been very successful, including in its ongoing litigations against Amazon and Facebook,” Khan said. “And so it’s only going to be natural that those companies are going to want to come in and see, can they get some type of sweetheart deal?”
Republicans welcomed Meta’s announcement as validation of their long-running complaints.
“I think they’ve come a long way,” Trump said during a press conference on Tuesday. Asked if he thought Zuckerberg was “directly responding to the threats that you have made to him in the past,” Trump responded: “Probably.”
“Meta finally admits to censoring speech…what a great birthday present to wake up to and a huge win for free speech,” Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) posted on X.
Research has shown that Republicans circulated more unfounded claims. One study also found that far right content was more engaging on Facebook, and that far-right sources known for spreading misinformation significantly outperformed non-misinformation sources. Data to definitively prove bias on a platform level is not available to researchers.
Meta to follow Elon Musk’s cues on fact-checking
Meta said instead of working with third-party fact checkers, it would shift to a “community notes” program where users write and rate notes that appear next to specific posts. That’s similar to the approach Elon Musk has championed on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.
“I think Elon’s played an incredibly important role in moving the debate and getting people refocused on free expression,” Meta’s Kaplan told Fox & Friends on Tuesday.
Meta also said it would change how it enforces its policies, dialing back automated systems except for “illegal and high-severity violations” including terrorism, child sexual exploitation, and fraud. The company’s U.S. content moderation team will move from California to Texas. The move should “help us build trust to do this work in places where there is less concern about the bias of our teams,” Zuckerberg said.
Fact checkers who have worked with Meta for years pushed back against Zuckerberg’s accusation of bias.
“It was particularly troubling to see him echo claims of bias against the fact checkers because he knows that the ones that participated in his program were signatories of a code of principles that requires that they be transparent and nonpartisan,” said Bill Adair, co-founder of the International Fact Checking Network. He founded PolitiFact, one of the first participants in Facebook’s third party fact checker’s program, which he left in 2020.
“Meta, up until this morning, has always appreciated the independence of fact checkers,” Adair said.
Since Meta pays fact checkers for their work, some fact-checking organizations — most of which are non-profits — heavily rely on the company to survive. “We’ll see fewer fact-checking reports published and fewer fact checkers working,” said Angie Drobnic Holan, the director of International Fact Checking Network.
“I think the fact-checking programs on social media have been really positive for helping to reduce hoax content and conspiracy theories. And to see it so quickly curtailed this way without a whole lot of discussion is disappointing,” Holan said.
Meta’s funding of fact checkers reverberated beyond its own platforms, said Kate Starbird, a University of Washington disinformation researcher who co-founded its Center for an Informed Public. “Though integrated with Facebook’s infrastructure, their work had a much broader impact, and was often cited in other spaces, including the Community Notes program at X, which Meta says it will now copy.”
“In short, it is going to be more difficult for people to find information that they can trust online,” she said. Researchers also rely on the work of fact checkers to better understand what’s happening on social media platforms.
While the effects on some fact checkers will be immediate, the announcement is light on details about how Meta will change what its users see on their feeds, said Katie Harbath, global affairs officer at the technology consulting firm Duco Experts who formerly worked at Facebook.
But women and LGBTQ communities might be affected more, she said, given the few specific topics Meta mentioned.
“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 in the video.
“It’s not right that things can be said on TV or the floor of Congress, but not on our platforms,” Kaplan wrote in Meta’s press release about the new policies.
“I think those folks could be particularly negatively impacted [by] this and may have to make decisions about not being on these platforms and not having those audiences to engage with,” Harbath said.
