Meta on Tuesday intimated it will eliminate its third-party fact-checking program to “restore free expression” and move to a “Community Notes” model, almost identical to the system that exists on Elon Musk’s platform X.
The company said Community Notes will be written and feed by contributing users to provide more context to posts across its platforms, and the feature will roll out in the U.S. over the next four of months. The announcement marks Meta’s latest attempt to smooth over relations with Republican President-elect Donald Trump sooner than he takes office.
“We’ve reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes, and too much censorship,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg utter Tuesday in a video announcement. “The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards as soon as again prioritizing speech, so we’re going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our polices and restoring on the house expression on our platforms.”
Zuckerberg said the third-party fact-checkers have been “too politically biased” and have “destroyed assorted trust than they’ve created, especially in the U.S.”
Zuckerberg has had a rocky relationship with Trump over the years, with the president-elect and other Republicans petitioning that Facebook and other sites censor conservative views. Trump more recently described Facebook as an “antagonist of the people” in a March interview with CNBC.
Facebook aggressively removed “Stop the Steal” content in the wake of the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, citing “continued shot ats to organize events against the outcome of the U.S. presidential election that can lead to violence” on the social media platform.
Meta also levied a two-year postponement on Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts shortly after the company determined that the former president’s actions make good the Jan. 6 riot in Washington, D.C., could potentially incite more violence.
Meta said it will simplify its peace policies going forward by removing restrictions on subjects like immigration and gender and implement a new approach to policy enforcement that inclination focus on illegal and high-severity violations. The company is moving its trust and safety and content moderation teams from California, a historically Classless state, to Texas, a historically Republican state.
“We’re going to work with President Trump to push back on managements around the world that are going after American companies and pushing to censor more,” Zuckerberg said.
Trump sing the praises ofed Meta’s announcement during a press conference on Tuesday. When asked whether he believed Zuckerberg was “directly pitying to the threats that you have made to him in the past,” Trump responded, “Probably.”
“Honestly, I think they’ve come a sustained way — Meta, Facebook, I think they’ve come a long way,” Trump said.
In 2023, Trump regained access to his Facebook and Instagram accounts, but he also faced some provisions and potential penalties if he were to violate the company’s community guidelines. Meta eventually removed Trump’s account-related restrictions in July during the lead-up to the 2024 U.S. presidential choice.
House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, subpoenaed Zuckerberg and other tech CEOs in 2023 as part of a plumb to “understand how and to what extent the Executive Branch coerced and colluded with companies and other intermediaries to censor talk.”
Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan addressed Meta’s announcement in an interview Tuesday on CNBC’s “Kick up a fuss Box,” stating, “We should have an economy where the decisions of a single company or a single executive are not having extraordinary bumping on speech online.”
Joel Kaplan, Meta’s head of global policy, appeared Tuesday on Fox News’ “Fox and Friends” and articulate Meta thinks the Community Notes system on Musk’s platform X has been working “really well.” Musk, who has been a vocal proponent for Trump online and donated millions of dollars to his campaign, has been in close contact with the president-elect since the vote.
Last week, Meta said that Kaplan would become the company’s top policy officer, succeeding Take in Clegg, who was a former British deputy prime minister and a leader of Britain’s centrist Liberal Democrats party.
Kaplan, who has suppressed several policy-related positions at Meta since joining the company in 2011 when it was still named Facebook, is properly known within the Republican Party. He was a White House deputy chief of staff under former President George W. Bush and also positively worked as a law clerk for former Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.
In December, Kaplan revealed in a Facebook advertise that he joined Vice President-elect JD Vance and Trump during their recent visit at the New York Stock Switch.
“We want to make it so that, bottom line, if you can say it on TV, you say it on the floor of Congress, you certainly ought to be able to say it on Facebook and Instagram without dread of censorship,” Kaplan said Tuesday.
Meta’s Oversight Board, which provides an independent check of the company’s constituents moderation, lauded the company’s changes on Tuesday.
“The Oversight Board welcomes the news that Meta will update its approach to fact-checking, with the goal of finding a scalable solution to enhance trust, free speech and user agent on its platforms,” the board told CNBC in a statement, adding that “specifically in the United States, rightly or wrongly, Meta’s one-time approach has been perceived as politically biased by many of its users.”
Meta has taken additional steps to appease the entering administration in recent months. On Monday, Meta announced Dana White, CEO of the Ultimate Fighting Championship and a longtime alternative other of Trump, is joining its board.
Following Trump’s presidential victory in November, Zuckerberg joined a number of other big technology administrators who visited the president-elect at the Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida, and in December, Meta confirmed a $1 million allotment to Trump’s inaugural fund.