The social networking giant will stop using third-party fact checkers and instead rely on users to add notes to posts. President-elect Trump and his conservative allies said they were pleased.
Mike Isaac has covered Facebook and social media since 2010. Theodore Schleifer covers politics and Silicon Valley.
Meta said on Tuesday that it was ending its longstanding fact-checking program, a policy instituted to curtail the spread of misinformation across its social media apps, in a stark sign of how the company was repositioning itself for the Trump presidency and throwing its weight behind unfettered speech online.
Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, said it would now allow more speech, rely on its users to correct inaccurate and false posts, and take a more personalized approach to political content. It described the changes with the language of regret, saying it had strayed too far from its values over the previous decade.
“It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression,” Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, said in a video announcing the changes. The company’s fact-checking system, he added, had “reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship.”
Mr. Zuckerberg conceded there would be more “bad stuff” on the platforms as a result of the decision. “The reality is that this is a trade-off,” he said. “It means that we’re going to catch less bad stuff, but we’ll also reduce the number of innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally take down.”
Ever since Donald J. Trump’s victory in November, few big companies have worked as overtly to curry favor with the president-elect, who, during his first administration, accused social media platforms of censoring conservative voices. 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 to support Mr. Trump’s inauguration. Last week, Mr. Zuckerberg elevated Joel Kaplan, the highest-ranking 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’s, would join Meta’s board.
Meta executives recently gave a heads-up to Trump officials about the change in policy, said a person with knowledge of the conversations who spoke on condition of anonymity. The fact-checking announcement coincided with an appearance by Mr. Kaplan on “Fox & Friends,” a favorite show of Mr. Trump’s, where Mr. Kaplan said there was “too much political bias” in Meta’s fact-checking program.
Mr. Trump said that he had watched Mr. Kaplan’s Fox interview and found it “impressive” and that Meta had “come a long way.” Mr. Trump also said Meta’s change was “probably” a result of the threats he had made against the company and Mr. Zuckerberg.
The influence of Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, who leads X, SpaceX and Tesla, also loomed large over Meta’s shift. Since buying X in 2022, Mr. Musk has thrown out the platform’s restrictions on online speech and has turned to a program called Community Notes, which depends on X’s users to police false and misleading content. Mr. Musk, who has become a key adviser to Mr. Trump, also moved X to Texas and out of California, where it had been based, and has criticized California’s policies.
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Uncovering Truth: The Impact of Meta's Decision to End Fact-Checking Program
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