Social media giant Meta on Tuesday announced a major rollback of its content moderation policies, including the termination of its third-party fact-checking program in the United States.
“We’re getting rid of fact-checkers and replacing them with community notes similar to X (formerly Twitter), starting in the US,” Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a social media post .
Zuckerberg said that “fact checkers have been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they have created, especially in the United States.”
Meta’s announcement echoed many of the complaints raised by Republicans and X owner Elon Musk about fact-checking programs that many conservatives view as censorship.
The 40-year-old tycoon said that “the recent elections seem like a cultural turning point towards prioritizing, once again, discourse.”
The change came as Zuckerberg has been making efforts to reconcile with US President-elect Donald Trump, including donating $1 million to his inauguration fund.
Zuckerberg also said that meta sites, including Facebook and Instagram, would “simplify” their content policies “and remove a lot of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are simply out of touch with mainstream discourse.”
Trump has been a harsh critic of Meta and Zuckerberg in recent years, accusing the company of supporting liberal policies and being biased against conservatives.
The Republican was banned from Facebook following the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol, although the company reinstated his account in early 2023.
Zuckerberg also dined with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort in November, as he sought to repair the company’s relationship with the incoming US leader following the presidential election.
In another recent gesture toward Trump’s team, Meta last week named Republican stalwart Joel Kaplan to run the company’s public affairs, replacing Nick Clegg, the former British deputy prime minister.
“Too much harmless content is censored, too many people are unfairly locked up in ‘Facebook jail,'” Kaplan said in a statement, insisting that his current approach to content moderation has “gone too far.”
Zuckerberg also appointed Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) head Dana White, a close Trump ally, to Meta’s board.
As part of the overhaul, Meta said he will move his trust and safety teams from California, where liberal views are common, to more conservative Texas.
“That will help us build confidence to do this work in places where there is less concern about bias on our teams,” Zuckerberg said.
Additionally, Meta announced that it would reverse its 2021 policy of reducing political content on its platforms.
Instead, the company will take a more personalized approach, allowing users more control over the amount of political content they see on Facebook, Instagram and Threads.
AFP It currently works in 26 languages with Facebook’s fact-checking program, where Facebook pays to use fact-checks from around 80 organizations globally on its platform, WhatsApp and Instagram.
