Meta said Tuesday it was ending its long-standing fact-checking program, a policy designed to curb the spread of misinformation on its social media apps, in the clearest sign that That’s how the company is repositioning itself for the Trump presidency and throwing its weight behind it. Unfettered Speech Online.
Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, said it would now allow more speech, trust its users to correct inaccurate and false posts, and take a more personalized approach to political content. It described the changes in language of regret, saying it had strayed too far from its values over the past decade.
“Now is the time to return to our roots around free expression,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a video announcing the changes. The company’s fact-checking system, he said, “has reached a point where there are a lot of mistakes and a lot of censorship.”
Mr Zuckerberg acknowledged that the decision would result in more “bad things” on the platforms. “The reality is it’s a compromise,” he said. “This means we’ll catch less bad stuff, but we’ll also reduce the number of posts and accounts from innocent people that we accidentally remove.”
In November Donald J. Since Trump’s victory, some big companies have worked openly to support the president-elect, 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 tipping point” from the election.
Mr. Zuckerberg dined with Mr. Trump at Mar-a-Lago in November and Meta later donated $1 million in support of Mr. Trump’s inauguration. Last week, Mr. Zuckerberg promoted Joel Kaplan, the Meta executive closest to the Republican Party, to the company’s most senior 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 officials recently briefed Trump officials about the policy change, a person with knowledge of the conversations said on condition of anonymity. The announcement of the fact-checking coincided with an appearance by Mr. Kaplan on Mr. Trump’s favorite show, “Fox & Friends,” where Mr. Kaplan said that Meta’s fact-checking program had “too much political bias.”
Mr Trump said he had watched Mr Kaplan’s Fox interview and found it “impressive” and that Meta had “come a very long way.” Mr Trump also said Meta’s change was “probably” the result of threats made against the company and Mr Zuckerberg.
The influence of Elon Musk, the world’s richest man who leads X, SpaceX and Tesla, also weighed heavily on Meta’s innings. Since buying Mr Musk, who has become a key adviser to Mr Trump, also took Ax out of Texas and California, where it was based, and has criticized California policies.
On Tuesday, Meta said it would also turn to the Community Notes program after seeing “this approach works on X.” Additionally, Mr. Zuckerberg said his company would run its U.S. trust and security and content moderation operations from Texas rather than California “to allow this work to be done in places where there are less concerns about bias on our teams.”
In his Fox appearance on Tuesday, Mr. Kaplan rejected the idea that anyone was influencing Mr. Zuckerberg’s decisions.
“There’s no doubt that the things that happen in Meta are coming from Mark,” Mr. Kaplan said. But, he added, “I think Elon played an incredibly important role in moving the debate forward and getting people to refocus on free expression.”
Misinformation researchers said Meta’s decision to end fact-checking was extremely worrying. Nicole Gill, founder and executive director of the digital watchdog organization Accountable Tech, said Mr Zuckerberg was “reopening the same floodgates of hate, disinformation and conspiracy theories that happened on January 6 – and that are continuing, de facto – World Violence.”
In 2021, Facebook suspended Mr Trump’s account for inciting violence following the January 6 riot at the Capitol, later restoring it. Several studies have since shown that interventions such as Facebook’s fact-checking were effective in reducing belief in lies and reducing how often such content was shared.
But Meta’s move enraged Mr. Trump’s conservative allies, many of whom dislike Meta’s practice of adding disclaimers or warnings to questionable or inaccurate posts. Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky said in a post on X that Meta had “finally admitted to censoring speech” and called the change “a huge victory for free speech.”
Other Republicans were skeptical. Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee said in a post on X that META’s change was “a ploy to avoid being regulated.”
Inside Meta, Mr. Zuckerberg’s announcements were met with praise and fear. Three current and former employees said that for some employees, Mr. Zuckerberg was finally becoming his “authentic self,” uninhibited by “woke” critics.
Others said Mr. Zuckerberg was harassing current and former employees despite his efforts at content moderation. As upset employees posted about the changes on internal message boards, human resources workers quickly removed the posts, the people said, saying they broke the rules of the company’s policy on community engagement. Meta implemented a policy in 2022 to keep controversial social issues out of the workplace.
Meta’s decision to move moderation teams from California to Texas to “eliminate bias” particularly attracted internal attention, the people said. The company has long had staff in Texas moderating topics, the people said. In private channels and group chats, others commented how it was okay to criticize Meta’s policy on freedom of speech — as long as you did it from inside the company.
Meta’s fact-checking policy was born out of Mr Trump’s previous election victory in 2016. At the time, Facebook came under criticism for the uncontrolled spread of misinformation on its network, including posts from foreign governments intended to sow discord among the American public. ,
After intense public pressure, Mr. Zuckerberg hired outside organizations such as The Associated Press, ABC News and the fact-checking site Snopes, as well as other global news outlets checked by the International Fact-Checking Network, to deal with potentially false or misleading posts. Turned to organizations. Facebook and Instagram and decide whether they need to be annotated or deleted.
The company invested billions of dollars, thousands of people, and devoted vast technical resources over the next eight years to fixing content moderation issues. Mr. Zuckerberg turned to more than a dozen outside firms to help police checkpoints, including an army of contractors from companies like Accenture to do much of the manual work of reviewing posts.
Mr. Zuckerberg also stressed the importance of artificial intelligence in tackling many of these issues, noting that nearly half of the people on Earth regularly post on one or more of Meta’s apps.
But over time, Mr. Zuckerberg became frustrated with the lack of credit given to the company for trying to reduce misinformation, two people close to the chief executive said. He felt that the time and effort that Meta had put into this initiative was getting diminishing returns, he said.
Mr. Zuckerberg expressed his frustration in a speech at Georgetown University in 2019, in which he said he did not want his social network to become an “arbiter of speech.” He said Facebook was founded to give people a voice and that critics attacking the company for doing so are setting a dangerous precedent.
Mr Zuckerberg also expressed regret at the pressure the Biden administration had put on him to remove content related to Covid-19, a sentiment he expressed publicly in a letter to Congress last year. In the letter, Mr. Zuckerberg said the administration responded to requests to remove content “including humor and satire.” “Ultimately, Meta should have paid more attention to the White House’s requests,” he said.
By 2022, Meta had begun to furlough some of its content moderation and policy teams as part of broader corporate cost cutting. The company continues to make strategic downsizing on a sequential basis.
The changes announced Tuesday included removing restrictions on topics such as immigration and gender identity, which Mr. Zuckerberg said were “out of touch with mainstream discourse.” Meta said it would begin phasing out more personalized political content, based on signals it gave people about what they were interested in seeing in their feed.
Mr. Zuckerberg has also evolved personally. In recent years, he has become closer to the Ultimate Fighting Championship’s Mr. White, and has immersed himself in the right-leaning environment of professional fighting. He is tired of the constant attacks on him and his company and has found it frustrating to deal with Mr. Biden’s proactive approach to reining in the tech industry, two people familiar with his thinking said.
Above all, the incoming Trump administration and its focus on free speech allows Meta to finally free itself of the Sisyphean task of monitoring the billions of posts flowing through its apps.
“We have a new administration coming in that is far from pressuring companies to censor and is a huge supporter of free expression,” Mr. Kaplan said on Fox. “It takes us back to the values on which Mark founded the company.”
kate conger And Stuart A Thompson Contributed to the reporting.