Meta Ditches Fact-Checkers Ahead of Trump’s Second Term

Meta announced Tuesday that it is abandoning its third-party fact-checking programs on Facebook, Instagram and Threads and replacing its army of paid moderators with a community notes model that mimics X’s. The much-maligned volunteer programwhich allows users to publicly flag content they find inaccurate or misleading

In A blog post Announcing the news, Meta’s newly appointed chief global affairs officer, Joel Kaplan, said the decision was made to allow more topics to be discussed openly on the company’s platform. The change will first affect the company’s holdings in the United States.

“We will allow more speech by lifting restrictions on some topics that are part of mainstream speech and focusing our enforcement on illegal and high-intensity violations,” Kaplan said, though he did not elaborate on what the new rules would cover.

In a video accompanying the blog post, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the new policies would return more political content to people’s feeds as well as posts about other topics that have inflamed the culture wars in the US in recent years.

“We’re going to simplify our content policies and get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are out of touch with mainstream discussion,” Zuckerberg said.

There is meta Significantly rolled back To get rid of fact-checking and content moderation policies it introduced in 2016 in the wake of revelations about influence operations conducted on its platforms, designed to influence elections and in some cases violence and Even genocide.

Before last year’s high-profile elections around the world, there was meta Criticized for taking a hands-off approach To moderate content related to that vote.

Echoing comments from Mark Zuckerberg last yearKaplan said that Meta’s content moderation policies were put in place not to protect users but “in part to moderate content in response to social and political pressure.”

Kaplan blasted fact-checking experts for their “biases and biases” that led to excessive moderation: “Over time we’ve ended up fact-checking a lot more content than people think can be legitimate political speech and debate,” Kaplan wrote.

But WIRED reported last year that dangerous content is similar Medical misinformation Platforms thrive when teams choose Anti-government militias have used Facebook To recruit new members.

Zuckerberg, meanwhile, blamed “legacy media” for forcing Facebook to implement content moderation policies in the wake of the 2016 election. “After Trump was first elected in 2016, the legacy media wrote endlessly about how misinformation was a threat to democracy,” Zuckerberg said. “We have tried, in good faith, to address those concerns without being arbiters of truth, but fact checkers have been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they have created,”

In what he tried to frame as a bid to eliminate bias, Zuckerberg said Matter’s in-house trust and safety team would move from California to Texas, now home to X’s headquarters. “As we work to promote free expression, I think it will help us build confidence to do this work in a place where we have less concern about party bias,” Zuckerberg said.