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

Facebook has already contributed to the decline of journalism, and this will be the final nail in the coffin,” Nina Yankovic, a former disinformation chief in the Biden administration and now CEO of the American Sunlight Project, said in an emailed statement. “Newsrooms receive grants from Facebook to check facts. This money allows them to do other journalism. Zuckerberg’s statement is a complete kneeling before Trump and an attempt to catch up with Musk in his race to the bottom. Fact-checking was not a panacea for misinformation on Facebook, but it was an important part of moderation.”

Zuckerberg tried to portray this as an attempt to eliminate bias, saying Meta’s internal trust and safety team would move from California to Texas, where X is also currently headquartered. “As we work to promote free speech, I think this will help us build trust in doing this work in places where there are fewer concerns about the bias of our teams,” Zuckerberg said.

X alternative to BlueSky announced last August that it is also considering introducing a “Community Notes” style feature specifically designed to address the issue of “dog hoarding and other forms of harassment.” This feature has not yet been introduced.

Like X, the meta approach would use an army of volunteers to write community notes on posts, but in order for those posts to be visible to all users, other volunteers would need to vote to approve the note. “As with X, Community Notes will require consensus among people with differing viewpoints to prevent rating bias,” Kaplan wrote.

“We’ve seen this approach work at X – where they give their community the power to decide when posts are potentially misleading and require more context, and people with different viewpoints decide what context will be useful to other users,” Kaplan wrote.

But Community Notes on X, first introduced as BirdWatch in 2021, has repeatedly proven that not only has it failed to stem the tide of misinformation and hate speech that has come to dominate the platform, but it has actually 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 criticized lawmakers in Europe and Latin America for excessive censorship and stifling free speech.

“We are going to work with President Trump to fight back against governments around the world that target American companies and push for more censorship,” Zuckerberg said.

But critics of Zuckerberg and Mehta were quick to criticize the policy changes. “Today’s announcement by Meta is a rejection of any reasonable and safe approach to content moderation,” said Real Facebook Supervisory Boardan activist group formed in response to Meta’s creation of its own oversight board, the statement said.

“Censorship is a manufactured crisis, a political pandering designed to send the message that Meta’s platforms are open for business for far-right propaganda. Twitter’s refusal to fact-check has turned the platform into a cesspool; Zuckerberg joins them in the race to the bottom.”