Meta said Tuesday it was ending its long-standing fact-checking program, a policy instituted to curb the spread of misinformation on its social media apps, in a stark sign of how the company has repositioned itself for the Trump presidency and was dropping the weight of the back. unlimited internet talk.
Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, said it will now allow more speech, rely on its users to correct inaccurate and false posts and take a more personalized approach to political content. She described the changes with the language of regret, saying she had drifted far from her values in the previous decade.
“It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression,” Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s CEO, 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 admitted there would be more “bad stuff” on the platforms as a result of the decision. “The reality is that this is a compromise,” he said. “It means we’ll catch less bad stuff, but we’ll also reduce the number of innocent people’s posts and accounts we accidentally take down.”
Since the victory of Donald J. Trump in November, few major companies have worked so overtly to curry favor with the president-elect, who, during his first administration, has accused social media platforms of censoring conservative voices. In a series of announcements during this presidential transition period, Meta abruptly changed his strategy in response to what Mr. Zuckerberg called the election a “cultural turning point.”
Mr. Zuckerberg dined with Mr. Trump at Mar-a-Lago in November, and Meta later donated $1 million to support Mr. Trump’s inauguration. Trump. Last week, Mr. Zuckerberg elevated Joel Kaplan, Meta’s most senior executive closest to the Republican Party, to the company’s top political role. And on Monday, Mr. Zuckerberg said Dana White, head of the Ultimate Fighting Championship and an ally of Mr. Trump, will join Meta’s board of directors.
Meta executives recently briefed Trump officials about the policy change, 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, where Mr. Kaplan said there was “too much political bias” in Meta’s fact-checking program.
Mr. Trump said he had watched Mr. Kaplan on Fox and found her “impressive” and that Meta had “come a long way”. Mr. Trump also said Meta’s change was “probably” a result of threats he had made against the company and Mr. Zuckerberg.
The influence of Elon Musk, the richest man in the world who leads X, SpaceX and Tesla, was also big in the Meta shift. Since purchasing X in 2022, Mr. Musk rejected the platform’s restrictions on online speech and turned to a program called Community Notes, which relies on X users to monitor 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 he was based, and criticized California policies.
On Tuesday, Meta said it would also switch to a Community Notes program after seeing “this approach work on X.” In addition, Mr. Zuckerberg said his company would run its U.S. trust and security and content control operations from Texas instead of California “to do that work in places where there’s less concern about our groups being biased.”
In his appearance on Fox on Tuesday, Mr. Kaplan disputed the idea that anyone was influencing Mr. Zuckerberg.
“There’s no doubt that the things that happen at Meta come from Mark,” said Mr. Kaplan. But, he added, “I think Elon played an incredibly important role in moving the conversation and getting people to refocus on free expression.”
Disinformation researchers said Meta’s decision to end fact-checking was deeply troubling. Nicole Gill, founder and executive director of digital watchdog organization Accountable Tech, said Mr. Zuckerberg was “reopening the floodgates for the same wave of hate, misinformation and conspiracy theories that sparked January 6th — and that continue to spark real-world violence.”
In 2021, Facebook closed the account of Mr. Trump after the Jan. 6 riot on Capitol Hill for inciting violence, before later reinstating him. Multiple studies have since shown that interventions such as Facebook background checks have been effective in reducing the belief in lies and the frequency with which such content is shared.
However, Metta’s move excited conservative allies of Mr. Trump, many of whom disliked Meta’s practice of adding disclaimers or warnings to questionable or false posts. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Kentucky, said in a post on X that Meta is “finally admitting to censoring speech” and called the change “a huge victory for free speech.”
Other Republicans were skeptical. Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tennessee, said in a post on X that Meta’s change was “a ploy to avoid regulation.”
Inside Meta, the announcements of Mr. Zuckerberg became the object of both praise and horror. For some employees, Mr. Zuckerberg was finally being his “authentic self,” unhindered by “woke” critics, three current and former employees said.
Others said that Mr. Zuckerberg has been throwing current and former employees under the bus despite their efforts to moderate content. As upset employees posted about the changes on internal message boards, human resources workers quickly removed the posts, the people said, saying they violated the rules of a company policy on community involvement. Meta implemented the policy in 2022 to keep contentious social issues out of the workplace.
Meta’s decision to move moderate groups from California to Texas to “eliminate bias” drew particular attention internally, the people said. The company has long had temperance workers in Texas, the people said. In private channels and group chats, others noted how it was fine to criticize Meta’s free speech policy — unless you did it from within the company.
Meta’s fact-checking policy was born out of the previous election victory of Mr. Trump, in 2016. At the time, Facebook came under fire for rampantly spreading disinformation on its network, including posts from foreign governments trying to sow discord among the American public.
After enormous public pressure, Mr. Zuckerberg turned to outside organizations such as the Associated Press, ABC News and fact-checking website Snopes, along with other global organizations vetted by the International Fact-Checking Network, to look into possible false or misleading posts on Facebook and Instagram and decide whether they had to be commented out or removed.
The company spent the next eight years investing billions of dollars, thousands of people, and devoting vast technological resources to fixing content control issues. Mr. Zuckerberg tapped more than a dozen outside firms to help police posts, including an army of contractors from companies like Accenture to do much of the manual work of reviewing posts.
Mr. Zuckerberg also emphasized the importance of artificial intelligence in handling many of these issues, given that nearly half of the people on earth regularly post to one or more of Meta’s apps.
But over time, Mr. Zuckerberg grew frustrated with the lack of credit given to the company for trying to stamp out misinformation, two people close to the CEO said. He felt the time and effort Meta had put into the initiative was seeing diminishing returns, they said.
Mr. Zuckerberg expressed this frustration in a speech at Georgetown University in 2019, in which he said he didn’t want his social network to be an “arbiter of discourse.” He said Facebook was founded to give people a voice and that critics who attacked the company for that set a dangerous example.
Mr. Zuckerberg also lamented pressure from the Biden administration to remove content related to Covid-19, a sentiment he conveyed publicly in a letter to Congress last year. In the letter, Mr. Zuckerberg said the administration exceeded requests to remove content, “including humor and satire.” In retrospect, Meta should have pushed back on the White House’s requests more, he said.
By 2022, Meta had begun to gain some of its content and policy moderation teams as part of extensive corporate cost-cutting. The company continues to make strategic cuts on a rolling basis.
Among the changes announced on Tuesday were the lifting of restrictions on issues such as immigration and gender identity that Mr. Zuckerberg said they were “out of touch with the dominant discourse.” Meta said it would gradually start introducing more personalized political content, based on the messages people gave about what they were interested in seeing in their feeds.
Mr. Zuckerberg has also evolved personally. In recent years, he has grown closer to Mr. White of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, and has immersed himself in the proper environment of professional combat. He has grown tired of the constant attacks on him and his company and found it frustrating to deal with Mr. Biden to rein in the tech industry, two people familiar with his thinking said.
Above all, the incoming Trump administration and its focus on free speech allows Meta to finally be freed from the Sisyphean task of monitoring the billions of posts flowing through its apps.
“We have a new administration that comes a long way from pushing companies to censor and is a huge supporter of free expression,” said Mr. Kaplan at Fox. “It brings us back to the values that Mark founded the company on.”
Kate Conger and Stuart A. Thompson contributed to the report.
