Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Tuesday said the social media company is ending its fact-check program and replacing it with a community-driven system similar to that of Elon Musk’s X.
Zuckerberg cited the election as underlying the decision, calling it a “cultural tipping point towards, once again, prioritizing speech.” Zuckerberg made the announcement in a video. “We’re going to get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with community notes similar to X, starting in the U.S.”
The changes will impact Meta platforms Facebook and Instagram — which have billions of users — as well as Threads.
The systems put in place to moderate its platforms make too many mistakes, Zuckerberg stated.
Meta introduced its fact-checking program in 2016 as part of an effort to curb misinformation. The initiative was launched in response to criticism over Facebook’s role in spreading false claims during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. A 2023 statement from Meta said the fact-checking program had “expanded to include nearly 100 organizations working in more than 60 languages globally.”
Community trust
Meta does plan to continue to moderate content related to drugs, terrorism, child exploitation, frauds and scams, Joel Kaplan, Meta’s chief global affairs officer and Clegg’s successor, wrote in a post. Facebook’s trust and safety content moderation team is also moving from California to Texas and other U.S. locations.
Kaplan also said entrusting users to effectively moderate Meta’s social media platforms should benefit its content.
“We’ve seen this approach work on X – where they empower their community to decide when posts are potentially misleading and need more context, and people across a diverse range of perspectives decide what sort of context is helpful for other users to see,” he wrote. “We think this could be a better way of achieving our original intention of providing people with information about what they’re seeing – and one that’s less prone to bias.”
Meta said it would roll out its Community Notes approach over the next two month and continue refining it over the rest of the year. That will include no longer demoting content that users have fact-checked and including what Kaplan called “a much less obtrusive label” pointing people to additional information.
Preparing for Trump
The announcement came a day after Meta said former Ultimate Fighting Championship chief executive Dana White, a close ally of President-elect Donald Trump, would join its board, and shortly after former UK deputy prime minister Nick Clegg announced he was stepping down as president of global affairs.
Musk, a major supporter and financial backer of Trump during his presidential campaign, is thought to have the ear of the president-elect on issues ranging from how to slash federal spending to transportation policy.
Since Trump’s November victory at the polls over Kamala Harris, Meta and other major technology companies have also sought to engender good will with the incoming administration. In December, for example, Meta donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund, while Zuckerberg dined with him at his Mar-a-Lago estate.
Such gestures seemed aimed at repairing Meta’s relations with Trump, which soured after Facebook banned him from Facebook following the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, when the company ruled that his posts on the platform had helped foster the violence that day.
“Meta is repositioning the company for the incoming Trump administration,” Jasmine Enberg, principal analyst at research firm Emarketer, said in an an email. “The move will elate conservatives, who’ve often criticized Meta for censoring speech, but it will spook many liberals and advertisers, showing just how far Zuckerberg is willing to go to win Trump’s approval.”
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