Meta said Tuesday it was ending its long-standing fact-checking program, a policy put in place to curb the spread of misinformation through its social media apps, in a clear sign of how the company was repositioning itself for the presidency of Trump and pulling his weight behind him. unrestricted speech online.
Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, said it would now allow more speech, rely on its users to correct inaccurate and false posts and take a more personalized approach to political content. It described the changes with the language of regret, saying it had strayed too far from its values over the past decade.
“It's time to return to our free speech roots,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a video announcing the changes. The company's fact-checking system, he added, had “reached a point where there are just too many errors and too much censorship.”
Mr Zuckerberg admitted that there would be more “bad things” on the platforms as a result of the decision. “The reality is this is a trade-off,” he said. “It means we'll intercept less bad stuff, but we'll also reduce the number of innocent people's messages and accounts we accidentally delete.”
Since Donald J. Trump's victory in November, few major companies have worked so openly to curry favor with the newly elected president, who accused social media platforms of censoring conservative voices during his first administration. In a series of announcements during this presidential transition period, Meta has sharply shifted its strategy in response to what Mr. Zuckerberg called a “cultural inflection point” marked by the election.
Mr Zuckerberg dined with Mr Trump at Mar-a-Lago in November and Meta later donated $1 million to support Mr Trump's inauguration. Last week, Mr. Zuckerberg elevated Joel Kaplan, the top Meta executive closest to the Republican Party, to the company's top policy role. And on Monday, Mr. Zuckerberg said Dana White, the head of the Ultimate Fighting Championship and an ally of Mr. Trump, would join Meta's board.
Meta executives recently gave Trump officials a warning about the policy change, said a person with knowledge of the conversations who spoke on condition of anonymity. The fact-checking announcement coincided with an appearance by Mr. Kaplan on “Fox & Friends,” a favorite show of Mr. Trump, in which Mr. Kaplan said there was “too much political bias” in Meta's fact-checking program.
Mr. Trump said he saw Mr. Kaplan's Fox interview and found it “impressive” and that Meta “has come a long way.” Mr Trump also said Meta's change was “likely” a result of the threats he made against the company and Mr Zuckerberg.
The influence of Elon Musk, the world's richest man who runs X, SpaceX and Tesla, also loomed large with Meta's shift. Since purchasing Mr Musk, who has become a key adviser to Mr Trump, also moved X to Texas and out of California, where it was based, and has criticized California's policies.
On Tuesday, Meta said it would also move to a Community Notes program after seeing that “this approach works on X.” In addition, Mr. Zuckerberg said his company would run its U.S. trust, safety and content moderation operations from Texas instead of California “to do this work in places where there are fewer concerns about the bias of our teams.”
In his appearance on Fox on Tuesday, Kaplan pushed back against the idea that anyone influenced Zuckerberg's decisions.
“There is no doubt that the things that are happening at Meta come from Mark,” Mr. Kaplan said. But he added: “I think Elon has played an incredibly important role in moving the debate and refocusing people on free speech.”
Disinformation researchers said Meta's decision to end fact-checking was deeply concerning. Nicole Gill, founder and executive director of the digital watchdog organization Accountable Tech, said Mr Zuckerberg “reopened the floodgates to the very same wave of hate, disinformation and conspiracy theories that caused January 6 – and continues to fuel real-world violence.”
In 2021, Facebook shut down Mr. Trump's account after the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol for inciting violence, before later reinstating it. Multiple studies have since shown that interventions like Facebook's fact checks were effective in reducing belief in falsehoods and reducing how often such content was shared.
But Meta's action cheered conservative allies of Mr. Trump, many of whom resented Meta's practice of adding disclaimers or warnings to questionable or false posts. Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, said in a post on
Other Republicans were skeptical. Senator Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee, said in a post on X that Meta's change was “a ploy to avoid being regulated.”
Meta's fact-checking policy stemmed from Trump's previous election victory in 2016. Facebook came under fire at the time for the uncontrolled spread of disinformation through its network, including messages from foreign governments seeking to sow division among the American public. .
After enormous public pressure, Mr. Zuckerberg turned to outside organizations such as The Associated Press, ABC News and the fact-checking site Snopes, along with other global organizations vetted by the International Fact-Checking Network, to sift through potentially false or misleading posts on the Internet . Facebook and Instagram and decide whether to annotate or delete them.
The company spent the next eight years investing billions of dollars, thousands of people, and deploying vast technological resources to solve content moderation problems. Mr. Zuckerberg enlisted more than a dozen outside companies to help police posts, including an army of contractors from companies like Accenture to do much of the manual work of reviewing posts.
Mr Zuckerberg also highlighted the importance of artificial intelligence in tackling many of these issues, as almost half of the people on earth regularly post on one or more of Meta's apps.
But over time, Mr. Zuckerberg grew frustrated with the lack of credit the company received for its efforts to combat misinformation, two people close to the CEO said. He felt that the time and effort Meta had put into the initiative was leading to diminishing returns, they said.
Mr. Zuckerberg expressed that frustration in a speech at Georgetown University in 2019, saying he did not want his social network to be “an arbiter of speech.” He said Facebook was founded to give people a voice, and that critics who attacked the company for that were setting a dangerous example.
Mr Zuckerberg also lamented the pressure the Biden administration put on him to remove content related to Covid-19, a sentiment he publicly expressed in a letter to Congress last year. In the letter, Mr. Zuckerberg said the government was going too far in requests to remove content, “including humor and satire.” In retrospect, Meta should have been more responsive to the White House's requests, he said.
By 2022, Meta had begun winnowing some of its content moderation and policy teams as part of widespread corporate cost cuts. The company continues to make ongoing strategic cuts.
Among the changes announced on Tuesday was the lifting of restrictions on topics such as immigration and gender identity, which Mr Zuckerberg said were “out of touch with mainstream discourse”. Meta said it would start by gradually introducing more personalized political content, based on the signals people gave about what they wanted to see in their feeds.
Mr. Zuckerberg has also evolved personally. In recent years, he has grown closer to the Ultimate Fighting Championship's Mr. White and immersed himself in the right-wing environment of professional fighting. He is fed up with constant attacks on him and his company and finds dealing with Mr. Biden's proactive approach to reining in the tech industry frustrating, two people familiar with his thinking say.
Above all, the new Trump administration and its focus on freedom of expression means that Meta can finally free itself from the Sisyphean task of monitoring the billions of messages flowing through its apps.
“A new administration is coming that is far from pressuring companies for censorship and is a strong supporter of free speech,” Kaplan told Fox. “It brings us back to the values on which Mark founded the company.”
Kate Conger And Stuart A. Thompson reporting contributed.
