Meta says it will end fact checking as Silicon Valley prepares for Trump

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.

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.

Meta also said it would change how it enforces its policies, relying less on 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.

Republicans welcomed the announcement as validating of their long-running claims that Meta and other tech companies are biased against conservatives.

“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 on Monday.