Meta Ditches Fact-Checkers Ahead of Trump’s Second Term

Facebook has already contributed to the demise of journalism and this will be the final nail in the coffin,” Nina Jankowicz, the former Biden administration disinformation czar who is now CEO of the American Sunlight Project, said in an emailed statement. “Newsrooms get grants from Facebook to provide fact-checks. That money allows them to do other journalism. Zuckerberg’s announcement is a full bending of the knee to Trump and an attempt to catch up to Musk in his race to the bottom. Fact-checking was not a panacea to disinformation on Facebook but it was an important part of moderation.”

In what he attempted to frame as a bid to remove bias, Zuckerberg said Meta’s in-house trust and safety team would be moving from California to Texas, which is also now home to X’s headquarters. “As we work to promote free expression, I think that will help us build trust to do this work in places where there is less concern about the bias of our teams,” Zuckerberg said.

X alternative BlueSky announced in August last year that it was also considering introducing a Community Notes style feature to specifically address the issue of “dog-piling and other forms of harassment.” The feature has yet to be introduced.

Like X, the Meta approach will utilize an army of volunteers who will write community notes on posts, but in order for those posts to be visible to all users, other volunteers will need to vote to approve the note. “Just like they do on X, Community Notes will require agreement between people with a range of perspectives to help prevent biased ratings,” Kaplan wrote.

“We’ve seen this approach work on X—where they empower their community to decide when posts are potentially misleading and need more context, and people across a diverse range of perspectives decide what sort of context is helpful for other users to see,” Kaplan wrote.

But Community Notes on X, first introduced as BirdWatch in 2021, has been shown repeatedly to not only fail to stem the tide of disinformation and hate speech that has come to dominate the platform, but is in fact adding to the problem.

Zuckerberg, who recently visited Trump at Mar-a-Lago and brought the President-elect a pair of the company’s new AR glasses, also slammed lawmakers in Europe and Latin America for overzealous censorship and stifling free speech.

“We’re going to work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world that are going after American companies and pushing to censor more,” Zuckerberg said.

But critics of Zuckerberg and Meta were quick to slam these policy changes. “Meta’s announcement today is a retreat from any sane and safe approach to content moderation,” the Real Facebook Oversight Board, an activist group established in response to the establishment of Meta’s own oversight board, said in a statement.

“Censorship is a manufactured crisis, political pandering to signal that Meta’s platforms are open for business to far-right propaganda. Twitter’s shift from fact checking has turned the platform into a cesspool; Zuckerberg is joining them in a race to the bottom.”