Mark Zuckerberg Says Meta Will End Fact-Checking Program
This morning, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg took to his social media platforms to announce that his company — which owns Facebook, Instagram and Threads — will be changing its fact-checking policy.
In a video message posted to Meta platforms, he laid out a number of changes. He said that they will replace their fact checkers with Community Notes, similar to what Elon Musk has done with X (formerly Twitter). Zuckerberg added that they will, “Simplify our content policies and remove restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are out of touch with mainstream discourse.”
It’s worth noting that doing this was not necessarily successful for X. Per the Washington Post, some advertisers pulled out of X due to Musk’s decision to “gut content moderation while restoring thousands of accounts previously suspended for breaking the site’s rules.” This move resulted in billions of dollars in lost value for its investors; CNN reported in September that “X is worth nearly 80% less than when [Musk] bought it.”
Zuckerberg’s announcement is largely being interpreted as a move to appease President-Elect Donald Trump and his administration, and he mentioned the president-elect by name during his video. He said that the recent election “feels like a cultural tipping point.” He said that Meta will, “Work with President Trump to push back against foreign governments going after American companies to censor more. The US has the strongest constitutional protections for free expression in the world, and the best way to defend against the trend of government overreach on censorship is with the support of the US government.”
He also mentioned that they will, “Move our trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California, and our US content review to Texas. This will help remove the concern that biased employees are overly censoring content.” Watch his video below and read his Threads posts here.
Zuckerberg also announced new Meta board members, including UFC CEO Dana White. Meta Chief Global Affairs Officer Joel Kaplan appeared on Fox News’s Fox & Friends this morning, moments after Zuckerberg’s announcement, to discuss the company’s new policies. He stressed that Facebook will have fewer restrictions than in recent years. Watch the full segment below.
“There’s no question that there’s been a change over the last four years. We saw a lot of societal and political pressure all in the direction of more content moderation, more censorship,” Kaplan said. “And we’ve got a real opportunity now. We’ve got a new administration with a new president coming in who are big defenders of free expression. And that makes a difference.”
President-elect Trump and Zuckerberg have had a rocky relationship over the years. Zuckerberg has criticized Trump often, and he removed the then-president’s Facebook account after the January 6, 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol. Trump, meanwhile, threatened Zuckerberg with “life in prison” in his book Save America, which was published in September, writing, “He told me there was nobody like Trump on Facebook. But at the same time, and for whatever reason, steered it against me. We are watching him closely, and if he does anything illegal this time he will spend the rest of his life in prison — as will others who cheat in the 2024 Presidential Election.”
In a press conference today, Trump was asked if Zuckerberg was responding to the threats Trump has made to him in the past; he responded, “Probably.”
Meta recently donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund, and Zuckerberg has met privately with Trump at Mar-a-Lago. It’s also worth noting that Meta faces an antitrust trial in April. The Federal Trade Commission first sued the company in 2020, during the first Trump administration. According to Reuters, the FTC claims, “The company acted illegally to maintain a monopoly on personal social networks. Meta, then known as Facebook, overpaid for Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014 to eliminate nascent threats instead of competing on its own in the mobile ecosystem.”
Per Meta’s latest investor report, the company has 3.3 billion daily users across its apps.
