The social networking giant will stop using third-party fact checkers and instead rely on users to add notes to posts. President-elect Trump and his conservative allies said they were pleased.
Meta has announced that it is discontinuing its long-standing fact-checking program, which was implemented to combat the spread of misinformation across its social media apps, in a stark indication of how the company was repositioning itself for the Trump presidency and throwing its weight behind free speech online.
Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, announced that it will now allow more speech, rely on users to fix inaccurate and fraudulent messages, and adopt a more tailored approach to political content. It expressed sorrow for the modifications, saying it had moved too far from its beliefs over the past decade.
Meta CEO, Zuckerberg conceded there would be more “bad stuff” on the platforms 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.”
Since Donald Trump’s election in November, few major corporations have pushed as hard to curry favor with the president-elect, who accused social media platforms of stifling conservative voices throughout his first term.
In a series of statements made throughout this presidential transition period, Meta has significantly changed its strategy in reaction to what Mr. Zuckerberg described as a “cultural tipping point” in the election.
Misinformation researchers said Meta’s decision to end fact-checking was deeply concerning. Nicole Gill, a founder and the executive director of the digital watchdog organization Accountable Tech, said Mr. Zuckerberg was “reopening the floodgates to the exact same surge of hate, disinformation and conspiracy theories that caused Jan. 6 — and that continue to spur real-world violence.”
In 2021, Facebook shut down Mr. Trump’s account after the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol for inciting violence, later reinstating him. Multiple studies have since shown that interventions like Facebook’s fact-checks were effective at reducing belief in falsehoods and reducing how often such content was shared.
But Meta’s move elated conservative allies of Mr. Trump, many of whom have disliked Meta’s practice of adding disclaimers or warnings to questionable or false posts. Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, said in a post on X that Meta “finally admits to censoring speech” and called the change “a huge win for free speech.”
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 decision to move moderation teams from California to Texas to “eliminate bias” attracted particular internal attention, the people said.
The company has long had workers on moderation topics in Texas, the people said. In private channels and group chats, others remarked on how it was fine to criticize Meta’s policy on free speech — unless you did it from inside the company.
Mr. Zuckerberg also emphasised the importance of artificial intelligence in addressing many of these concerns, noting that roughly half of the world’s population routinely posts to one or more of Meta’s apps.
Changes announced on Tuesday included the elimination of limitations on themes such as immigration and gender identity, which Mr. Zuckerberg described as “out of touch with mainstream discourse.” Meta announced that it would begin rolling out more tailored political information based on user signals about what they wanted to read in their feeds.
