Meta on Tuesday announced a set of changes to its content moderation practices that will effectively end its long-standing fact-checking program, a policy established to curb the spread of misinformation across its social media apps.
The change in age policy is a clear sign of how the company is repositioning itself in the Trump era. Meta described the changes in the language of mea culpa, saying the company had deviated too much from its values over the past decade.
“We want to roll back the machinery that makes our laws too restrictive and prone to overuse,” said Joel Kaplan, Meta’s newly appointed global policy officer, in a statement.
Instead of using news organizations and other third-party groups, Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and Threads, will rely on users to add notes or corrections to posts that may contain false or misleading information.
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, said in a video that this new process that will start in the United States in the coming months is similar to the one used by X, called Community Notes.
“It’s time to go back to our roots in terms of freedom of speech,” said Mr. Zuckerberg. The company’s current fact-checking system, he added, “has gotten to the point where it’s too many mistakes and too much research.”
Mr. Zuckerberg admitted that there will be more “bad things” on the platform as a result of the decision. “The reality is that this is a trade-off,” he said. “It means we’ll catch less bad stuff, but we’ll also reduce the number of innocent posts and accounts we accidentally take down.”
Elon Musk relies on Community Notes to flag misleading posts on X. Since taking over the social media, Mr. Musk, a major Trump donor, has positioned X as a platform behind Trump’s presidency.
Meta’s move will likely please President-elect Donald J. Trump’s administration and his conservative allies, many of whom dislike Meta’s practice of adding warnings or cautions to questionable or false posts. Mr. Trump has been insulting Mr. Zuckerberg, saying the fact-check feature has been mistreated by conservative users.
Since Mr. After Trump won a second term in November, Meta moved quickly to try to repair the strained relationship he and his company have with conservative workers.
Mr. Zuckerberg noted that the “recent election” felt like “a cultural tipping point to re-prioritize speech.”
In late November, Mr. Zuckerberg dined with Mr. Trump at Mar-a-Lago, where he also met with his secretary of state, Marco Rubio. Meta donated one million dollars to support the inauguration of Mr. Trump in December. Last week, Mr. Zuckerberg suggested Mr. Kaplan, a longtime conservative and Meta’s top executive close to the Republican Party, is in the company’s top policy position. And on Monday, Mr. Zuckerberg announced that Dana White, the head of the Ultimate Fighting Championship and a close friend of Mr. Trump, will join Meta’s board.
Meta executives recently asked Trump officials about the policy change, according to a person familiar with the discussions who spoke on condition of anonymity. The fact-checking announcement coincided with the appearance of Mr. Kaplan on “Fox & Friends,” Mr. Kaplan’s favorite show. Trump. He told the hosts of the conservative breakfast show that there is “too much political bias” in the reality show.
The change ends a practice the company started eight years ago, weeks after Mr. sowing discord within American society.
Due to great public pressure, Mr. Zuckerberg turned to outside organizations such as the Associated Press, ABC News and the fact-checking website Snopes, as well as other global organizations vetted by the International Fact-Checking Network, to compile potentially false or misleading posts on Facebook and Instagram and decide if it needs to be explained or removed.
Among these changes, Mr. Zuckerberg said, it will be “removing barriers to topics like immigration and sexuality that don’t fit into mainstream discourse.” He also said the trust and safety and content moderation teams would be moved from California, and US content review would move to Texas. That “could help remove concerns rather than biased staff processing excessive content,” he added.
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