Bending to the political headwinds of the incoming Trump administration, Facebook and Instagram owner Meta is scrapping its third-party fact-checking program and replacing it with “community notes” written by users similar to the model used by Elon Musk’s social platform X.
Announcing the policy shift Tuesday, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the latest election heralded “a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech.”
The tech giant said expert fact checkers have their own biases and too much content ends up being fact checked, and that it is pivoting to crowdsourcing contributions from users.
“We’ve seen this approach work on X – where they empower their community to decide when posts are potentially misleading and need more context,” Meta’s Chief Global Affairs Officer Joel Kaplan said in a blog post. He said the new system will be phased in over the coming months.
Meta is among several tech companies apparently working to get in Trump’s good graces before he takes office later this month. Meta and Amazon each donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund in December, and Zuckerberg had dinner with Trump at the his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida, bringing together the Facebook founder and the former president who was once banned from his social network.
Meta this week appointed Dana White, the president and CEO of Ultimate Fighting Championship and a familiar figure in Trump’s orbit, to its board of directors. Kaplan, a former adviser to George W. Bush, was announced as the head of Meta’s global affairs on Jan. 2.
Meta began fact checks in December 2016 after Donald Trump was elected president for the first time, in response to criticism that “fake news” was spreading on its platforms. For years, the tech giant boasted it was working with more than 100 organizations in over 60 languages to combat misinformation.
The Associated Press ended its participation in Meta’s fact-checking program a year ago.
The tech company said the new system will allow “more speech” by lifting restrictions on discussions of certain mainstream topics, such as immigration and gender, and focus on curbing illegal and “high severity violations,” including terrorism, child sexual exploitation and drugs.
Meta said that its approach of building complex systems to manage content on its platforms has “gone too far” and has made “too many mistakes” by censoring too much content.
“Meta is repositioning the company for the incoming Trump administration,” said Emarketer analyst Jasmine Enberg. “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.”