Meta to End Fact-Checking Program in Shift Ahead of Trump Term

Meta said Tuesday it was ending its long-standing fact-checking program, a policy put in place to limit the spread of misinformation on social media apps, a clear sign of how the company is repositioning itself ahead of Trump’s presidency and bolstering its weight. unlimited speech online.

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. It described the changes in terms of regret, saying it had strayed too far from its values ​​over the previous decade.

“It’s time to return to our roots on freedom of expression,” Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive of Meta, said in a video announcing the changes. The company’s fact-checking system, he added, “has reached a point where there are too many errors and too much censorship.”

Mr Zuckerberg acknowledged that the decision would result in more “bad things” appearing on platforms. “The reality is it’s a trade-off,” he said. “This means we’re going to catch fewer bad things, but we’re also going to reduce the number of posts and accounts of innocent people that we accidentally delete.”

Since Donald Trump’s victory in November, few major companies have worked so openly to win over the president-elect, who during his first administration accused social media platforms of censoring conservative voices. In a series of announcements made during the presidential transition, Meta dramatically changed its strategy in response to what Mr. Zuckerberg called a “cultural inflection point” after the election.

Mr Zuckerberg dined with Mr Trump at Mar-a-Lago in November and Meta later donated $1 million. support Trump’s inauguration. Last week Mr Zuckerberg Promoted Joel KaplanMeta’s highest-ranking executive, closest to the Republican Party and the company’s highest-ranking political position. And on Monday, Mr. Zuckerberg said Dana Whitehead of the Ultimate Fighting Championship and Trump ally, will join Meta’s board of directors.

Meta executives recently warned Trump officials about the policy change, according to a person familiar with the conversations who spoke on condition of anonymity. The fact-checking statement coincided with the emergence of Mister. Kaplan on “Fox & Friends,” Mr. Trump’s favorite show, Mr. Kaplan said there was “too much political bias” in the “Meta” fact-checking program.

Mr. Trump said he watched Mr. Kaplan’s interview on Fox and found him “impressive” and that Meta had “come a long way.” Mr. Trump also said Meta’s change was “likely” the result of threats he made against the company and Mr. Zuckerberg.

The influence of Elon Musk, the world’s richest man who heads X, SpaceX and Tesla, also greatly influenced Meta’s change. Since purchasing X in 2022, Musk has abandoned the platform’s restrictions on online performance and turned to a program called Community Noteswhich depends on X users to combat false and misleading content. Mr Musk, who has become a key adviser to Mr Trump, also moved X to Texas and from California, where she was based, and criticized California policies.

On Tuesday, Meta said it would also look to the Community Notes program after seeing “this approach works on X.” In addition, Mr. Zuckerberg said his company would run trust, safety and content moderation operations in the U.S. from Texas rather than California “to do this work in a place where there is less concern about the bias of our teams.”

In an appearance on Fox on Tuesday, Mr. Kaplan rejected the idea that anyone influences Mr. Zuckerberg’s decisions.

“There is no doubt that everything that happens at Meta comes from Mark,” Mr. Kaplan said. But he added: “I think Elon has played an incredibly important role in advancing the debate and reorienting people toward free speech.”

Disinformation researchers said Meta’s decision to stop fact-checking was deeply troubling. Nicole Gill, founder and chief executive of digital watchdog Accountable Tech, said Mr Zuckerberg was “reopening the floodgates to the same wave of hate, misinformation and conspiracy theories that sparked the events of January 6th – and which continue to fuel real events”. -global violence.”

In 2021, Facebook shut down Trump’s account after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot for inciting violence and later reinstated him. Multiple studies have since shown that interventions such as Facebook fact checking were effective in reducing belief in lies and the frequency of sharing such content.

But Meta’s move has emboldened Trump’s conservative allies, many of whom have taken issue with Meta’s practice of adding disclaimers or warnings to questionable or false reports. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., said in a post on X that Mehta has “finally admitted 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 the Meta change was “a ploy to avoid regulation.”

Inside Meta, Zuckerberg’s statements were met with praise and consternation. For some employees, Mr. Zuckerberg has finally become himself, free from “woke” critics, according to three current and former employees.

Others said Zuckerberg was throwing current and former employees under the bus, despite their efforts to moderate content. When upset employees posted messages about the changes on internal message boards, HR staff quickly deleted the messages, the people said, saying they violated the company’s community engagement policy. Meta set politics in place in 2022 Avoid controversial social issues in the workplace.

Meta’s decision to move moderation teams from California to Texas to “eliminate bias” has drawn particular internal scrutiny, the people said. The company has long had moderation staff in Texas, the people said. In private channels and group chats, others noted that it’s okay to criticize Meta’s free speech policies as long as you don’t do so from within the company.

Meta’s fact-checking policy was born out of Trump’s previous election victory in 2016. At the time, Facebook was criticized for allowing misinformation to spread unchecked on its network, including messages from foreign governments seeking to sow discord among the American public. .

Under enormous public pressure, Mr. Zuckerberg turned to third-party organizations such as the Associated Press, ABC News and the fact-checking site Snopes, as well as other global organizations verified by the International Fact-Checking Network, to comb through potentially false or misleading posts on Facebook. and Instagram and decide whether to annotate or delete them.

The company spent the next eight years investing billions of dollars, thousands of people, and vast technological resources to solve its content moderation problems. Mr. Zuckerberg has brought in more than a dozen outside firms to help police posts, including an army of contractors from firms such as Accenture do most of the manual work of reviewing messages.

Mr. Zuckerberg also emphasized the importance of artificial intelligence in solving many of these problems, given that nearly half of the people on Earth regularly post to one or more Meta apps.

But over time, Zuckerberg became frustrated that the company was not given credit for trying to curb misinformation, two people close to the CEO said. According to them, he felt that the efforts Meta put into the initiative were producing diminishing returns.

Mr. Zuckerberg expressed this disappointment in speech at Georgetown University in 2019, in which he said he didn’t want his social network to be the “arbiter of speech.” He said Facebook was founded to give people a voice and that critics who criticize the company for doing so are setting a dangerous example.

Mr Zuckerberg has also deplored the pressure the Biden administration has put on him to remove Covid-19-related content, a sentiment he expressed publicly in a letter to Congress last year. In the letter, Zuckerberg said the administration had gone too far in demanding that content be removed, “including humor and satire.” In hindsight, Mehta should have been more reluctant to rebuff White House requests, he said.

By 2022, Meta began shedding some of its content moderation and policy teams as part of widespread corporate cost cutting. The company continues to implement strategic reductions on an ongoing basis.

Among the changes announced on Tuesday was the lifting of restrictions on topics such as immigration and gender identity, which Mr Zuckerberg said were “disconnected from mainstream discourse”. Meta said it will begin gradually adding more personalized political content based on the signals people give about what they’re interested in seeing in their feeds.

Mr. Zuckerberg has developed personallytoo much. In recent years, he has become close with Mr. White of the Ultimate Fighting Championship and immersed himself in the right-wing milieu of professional fighting. He is tired of the constant attacks on him and his company and frustrated by President Biden’s proactive approach to reining in the tech industry, two people familiar with his views said.

Above all, the new Trump administration and its focus on words is allowing Meta to finally free itself from the Sisyphean task of monitoring the billions of messages flowing through its apps.

“We have a new administration coming in that is far from coercing companies into censorship and is a strong supporter of free speech,” Mr. Kaplan said on Fox. “It goes back to the values ​​that Mark founded the company on.”

Kate Conger And Stuart A. Thompson provided reporting.