Meta abruptly ends US fact-checks ahead of Trump term

Social media giant Meta on January 7, 2025, slashed its content moderation policies, including ending its US fact-checking program. [AFP] Social media giant Meta on Tuesday slashed its content moderation policies, including ending its US fact-checking program on Facebook and Instagram, in a major shift that conforms with the priorities of incoming president Donald Trump. "We're going to get rid of fact-checkers (that) have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they've created, especially in the US," Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a post. Instead, Meta platforms including Facebook and Instagram, "would use community notes similar to X (formerly Twitter), starting in the US," he added. Meta's surprise announcement echoed long-standing complaints made by Trump's Republican Party and X owner Elon Musk about fact-checking, which many conservatives see as censorship. They argue that fact-checking programs target right-wing voices, which has led to proposed laws in states like Florida and Texas to limit content moderation. "This is cool," Musk posted on his X platform after the announcement. The shift came as the 40-year-old tycoon has been making efforts to reconcile with Trump since his election in November, including donating one million dollars to his inauguration fund. Trump has been a harsh critic of Meta and Zuckerberg for years, accusing the company of bias against him and threatening to retaliate against the tech billionaire once back in office. Speaking to reporters at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, when asked if he believed the move was a response to his threats against Zuckerberg, Trump responded: "Probably, yeah." The Republican was kicked off Facebook following the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol by his supporters, though the company restored his account in early 2023. Angie Drobnic Holan, director of the International Fact-Checking Network, said the decision came after "extreme political pressure." The move "will hurt social media users who are looking for accurate, reliable information to make decisions about their everyday lives and interactions with friends and family." Ending 'Facebook jail' Zuckerberg, like several other tech leaders, has met with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida ahead of his January 20 inauguration. Meta has made several moves in recent days that are likely to please Trump's team, such as appointing former Republican official Joel Kaplan to head up public affairs at the company. He takes over from Nick Clegg, a former British deputy prime minister. Zuckerberg also named Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) head Dana White, a close ally of Trump, to the Meta board. Kaplan, in a statement Tuesday, insisted the company's approach to content moderation had "gone too far." "Too much harmless content gets censored, too many people find themselves wrongly locked up in 'Facebook jail,'" he said. As part of the overhaul, Meta said it will relocate its trust and safety teams from liberal California to more conservative Texas. "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. Zuckerberg also took a shot at the European Union "that has an ever-increasing number of laws institutionalizing censorship and making it difficult to build anything innovative there." The remark referred to new laws in Europe that require Meta and other major platforms to maintain content moderation standards or risk hefty fines. Zuckerberg said that Meta would "work with President Trump to push back against foreign governments going after American companies to censor more." Additionally, Meta announced it would reverse its 2021 policy of reducing political content across its platforms. Community Notes AFP currently works in 26 languages with Facebook's fact-checking program, in which Facebook pays to use fact-checks from around 80 organizations globally on its platform, WhatsApp and Instagram. In that program, content rated "false" is downgraded in news feeds so fewer people will see it and if someone tries to share that post, they are presented with an article explaining why it is misleading. Community Notes on X (formerly Twitter) allows users to collaboratively add context to posts in a system that aims to distill reliable information through consensus rather than top-down moderation. Meta's move into fact-checking came in the wake of Trump's shock election in 2016, which critics said was enabled by rampant disinformation on Facebook and interference by foreign actors, including Russia, on the platform.

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