Meta will no longer have any fact-checkers in the U.S. come Monday, according to chief global affairs officer Joel Kaplan.
Meta announced this significant policy change in January when it also loosened its content moderation rules.
The timing of this change coincided with President Trump’s inauguration, which Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg attended after donating $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund. Around the same time, Zuckerberg added Dana White, a longtime Trump ally and CEO of UFC, to Meta’s board.
“The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech,” Zuckerberg said in a video announcing the moderation changes.
Yet some of the speech that Zuckerberg is so intent on prioritizing comes at the expense of marginalized people.
“We do allow allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality,” Meta’s hateful conduct policy reads.
Meta is modeling its new fact-checking efforts after Community Notes at Elon Musk’s X, which puts the onus of moderation in part on other users rather than paid professionals.
“In place of fact checks, the first Community Notes will start appearing gradually across Facebook, Threads & Instagram, with no penalties attached,” Kaplan wrote on X.
While this community-based approach to content moderation can sometimes provide important context to misleading or controversial posts, it functions better in tandem with other content moderation tools, which Meta is eliminating.
Meta’s greatest currency is its users’ attention, and less content moderation means that there are more posts for people to see — plus, Meta’s news feed tends to surface content that generates a strong reaction.
Already, as Meta began rolling back its fact-checking programs, false content has begun to spread. One Facebook page manager, who spread the viral, fake claim that ICE will pay people $750 to tip them off about undocumented immigrants, told ProPublica that the end of the fact-checking program is “great information.”
“We’re getting rid of a number of restrictions on topics like immigration, gender identity and gender that are the subject of frequent political discourse and debate,” Kaplan wrote in January. “It’s not right that things can be said on TV or the floor of Congress, but not on our platforms.”
