Meta ends fact-checking, drawing praise from Trump
Meta will dismantle its extensive fact-checking program in the United States, chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said Tuesday, ending a practice that has sought to limit the spread of falsehoods on its platforms but has been assailed as censorship in conservative circles.
The company said it would allow its users to add context or debunk claims in notes that appear next to specific posts, a process pioneered by Elon Musk’s X. Meta will also lift restrictions on hot-button topics, such as immigration and gender identity, to focus on illegal or high-severity violations.
The announcement was accompanied by sweeping changes to Meta’s community guidelines, allowing for greater critiques of LGBTQ+ people and other marginalized groups. New rules allow posts calling for gender-based restrictions in bathrooms, sports and specific schools, or for characterizing homosexuality as a mental illness. Users may argue that military, law enforcement and teaching jobs should impose limitations based on gender.
Zuckerberg acknowledged the changes are a “trade-off” that will allow more “bad stuff” to circulate on Meta’s platforms. In a video accompanying a Meta blog post, Zuckerberg alluded to a “cultural tipping point” spurred by the presidential election victory of Donald Trump, who has often raged against fact-checking as an impediment to free speech.
He cited errors made by the company’s fact-checking team, promising to move remaining “trust and safety” workers from California to Texas, “where there’s less concern about the bias of our teams.”
“We’ve reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship,” Zuckerberg said. “So we are going to get back to our roots, focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies, and restoring free expression on our platforms.”
The move heralds a shift both at Meta and across the social media industry toward a more laissez-faire approach to what users can post - and a victory for conservatives who have waged a years-long campaign against fact-checking and content moderation.
In a news conference Tuesday, Trump - who in the past has derided Zuckerberg, threatening the CEO with prison - praised the move, saying, “I think they’ve come a long way.” Asked by a reporter whether he thought Zuckerberg was changing policy in response to Trump’s past threats, the president-elect replied, “Probably.”
A decade ago, revelations that Russian operatives exploited Facebook and other social networks to boost Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign sparked bipartisan pressure on tech giants to rein in fake news and disinformation. The industry doubled down on policing speech in 2021 - including by banning Trump from popular social media networks - in response to charges that online activity had fueled both the Jan. 6 insurrection and falsehoods about the coronavirus.
But Trump and leading Republicans increasingly fought back, decrying the efforts as a form of censorship and launching lawsuits and congressional investigations alleging a broad liberal conspiracy to quash conservative views - even as right-wing voices continued to thrive on social networks.
Now, with Trump returning to office, social networks are racing to roll back those policies as they position themselves to answer to a Republican administration and Congress.
“It is quite remarkable seeing [a] literally 180 degree shift,” said Zvika Krieger, a former director of Meta’s responsible innovation team.
The announcement is the latest in a flurry of changes at Meta that are likely to be embraced by a second Trump administration. Last week, the company named Joel Kaplan, a Republican with deep experience in Washington, as its chief global affairs officer, replacing former British politician Nick Clegg. And on Monday, it named Dana White, a longtime Trump ally and president of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, to its board of directors.
In November, Zuckerberg dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago. Last month, Meta donated $1 million to his inauguration committee as part of its bid to mend relations with the incoming president, whom the company suspended from its platforms in January 2021 before reinstating him in 2023.
Zuckerberg has been increasingly conciliatory toward Trump in the past year. He called the president-elect a “badass” after an attempted assassination in July. The following month, Zuckerberg told Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) in a letter that the Biden administration “repeatedly pressured” the company to remove some covid-related misinformation during the pandemic, agreeing with a long-standing Republican talking point.
Kaplan flaunted the news on an episode of “Fox & Friends” and echoed Republican criticisms in a blog post that lambasted fact-checkers as “biased,” creating “a program intended to inform too often became a tool to censor.”
The end of the fact-checking program could deal a devastating blow to the coterie of organizations that rely on Meta’s funding to track and counteract viral conspiracy theories.
To avoid direct responsibility for the thorny task of determining truth, Meta looked outside the company. It has built and funded a swath of independent organizations, using their recommendations on when to remove or label a post on one of its networks.
The policy shift came as a surprise to several of these organizations. “We did not know that this was coming,” said Alan Duke, editor in chief of Lead Stories, a fact-checking website that receives funding from Meta. “In fact, we had been assured that the 2025 fact-checking program was on and fully supported by Meta.”
A survey of fact-checking groups from around the world by the International Fact-Checking Network found that 63.5 percent of them participated in Meta’s Third-Party Fact-Checking Program, while less than 15 percent of fact-checkers participated in a similar program run by TikTok. The vast majority of groups have budgets of less than $1 million and rely on a handful of employees to conduct their work, according to the survey.
While Meta’s funding played a big role in building up the fact-checking market, its effect was somewhat limited. Independent fact-checkers could review only a small number of posts, and the company barred them from oversight of politicians’ speech.
“It’s not clear this was a tremendously effective program,” said Sol Messing, a research associate professor at New York University and former researcher at Meta. “There’s the natural limitation that you just can’t send every single article to a fact-checker and expect them to do a good job. There’s just too much content.”
Meta also plans to retool AI systems - which curtail the reach of posts that seem to break company rules - to focus on serious violations, such as terrorism, child sexual exploitation, drugs, fraud and scams. The company said it would eliminate most programs that automatically demote problematic content and reintroduce political content into users’ feeds, after limiting the subject since 2021.
Zuckerberg said the company would work with Trump to push back against international governments that are “going after American companies and pushing to censor more” content.
In recent years, Meta has rolled back or weakened policies intended to reduce the spread of falsehoods on its network. In the run-up to the 2024 election, the company allowed politicians to claim the 2020 election was rigged in political ads, allowed individual users to opt out of Meta’s fact-checking program and curtailed its voter information center - a program designed to promote accurate election information.
The approach might help Meta avoid regulatory battles in the new administration. Meta is slated to head to trial over a FTC lawsuit seeking to break up the company.
Andrew Ferguson, Trump’s pick to lead the Federal Trade Commission, has railed against moderation, saying he plans to target companies “that facilitate or promote censorship” through “anticompetitive cartels” for breakups.
The new community notes the system will be phased in over the next several months and honed over the course of 2025, the company said. Musk’s reliance on community notes in lieu of fact-checkers has drawn praise as a clever concept but has also been criticized as insufficient to rein in falsehoods and unfounded conspiracy theories on the platform.
“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.
Allowing unsavory content carries a business risk for social networks, as seen in the flurry of advertisers that fled from X after Musk relaxed moderation on the platform. But the impact on Meta is likely to be muted, said Jasmine Enberg, VP and principal analyst at eMarketer, a market research firm.
“Unlike X, Meta is an essential platform for advertisers, and it’s going to be a lot harder for them to pull the plug even as concerns over brand safety proliferate,” she added.
The dismantling of the fact-checking program drew praise from conservative leaders and condemnation from an array of consumer, civil rights and watchdog organizations on Tuesday.
Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, blasted Meta for what he called “significant steps back” in addressing antisemitism and hate online. “The only winner here is Meta’s bottom line and as a result, all of society will suffer,” he said in a statement.
Dan Evon of the nonprofit News Literacy Project added that the move “not only removes a valuable resource for users, but it also provides an air of legitimacy to a popular disinformation narrative: that fact-checking is politically biased.”
In a podcast interview last year, Zuckerberg said he regretted accepting criticism that social media was responsible for societal ills, arguing that the company should have pushed back harder on such allegations.
“I think that the political miscalculation was a 20-year mistake,” Zuckerberg said.
“I think it’s going to take another 10 years or so for us to fully work through that cycle before our brand and all of that is back to the place that it maybe could have been if I hadn’t messed that up in the first place.”
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Cat Zakrzewski and Cristiano Lima-Strong contributed to this report.
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