Meta removes fact-checking in a nod to Trump

Meta on tuesday announced eliminate its third-party fact-checking program to “restore free expression” and move to a “Community Notes” model, similar to the system that exists in Elon MuskX platform.

The company said that Community Notes will be written and evaluated by contributing users to provide more context to posts on its platforms, and the feature will be implemented in the United States in the coming months. The announcement marks Meta’s latest attempt to smooth relations with the Republican president-elect Donald Trump before he takes office.

“We have reached a point where there are too many mistakes, and too much censorship,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg he said in a video announcement on Tuesday. “The recent election also feels like a cultural tipping point towards a shift in prioritizing speech, so let’s go back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies and restoring free expression on our platforms.”

Zuckerberg said third-party fact-checkers have been “too politically biased” and have “destroyed more trust than they created, especially in the United States.”

Zuckerberg has had a rocky relationship with Trump over the years, with the president-elect and other Republicans claiming Facebook and other sites censor conservative views. Trump most recently described Facebook as “the enemy of the people” in March interview with CNBC.

Facebook has aggressively removed it “Stop the Steal” contained after the uprising of January 6, 2021, citing “continued attempts to organize events against the result of the presidential elections of the United States that may lead to violence” on the social platform.

Meta also took a two-year suspension on Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts shortly after the company determined that the former president’s actions following the January 6 riots in Washington, DC, could incite further violence.

Meta said it will simplify its content policies in the future by removing restrictions on topics such as immigration and gender and implementing a new approach to policy enforcement that will focus on illegal and high-severity violations. The company is moving its trust and security and content moderation team from California, a historically Democratic state, to Texas, a historically Republican state.

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

Trump praised Meta’s announcement during a press conference on Tuesday. When asked if he believed Zuckerberg would “respond directly to the threats you’ve made to him in the past,” Trump replied, “Probably.”

“Honestly, I think they’ve come a long 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 also faced some restrictions and potential penalties if he had violated the company’s community guidelines. Meta eventually removed restrictions related to Trump’s account in July during the run-up to the 2024 US presidential election.

House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, garden sub-shop Zuckerberg and other tech CEOs in 2023 as part of an investigation to “understand how and to what extent the Executive Branch coerced and colluded with companies and other intermediaries to censor speech.”

Federal Trade Commission Chairman Lina Khan addressed Meta’s announcement in an interview Tuesday on CNBC”Squawk Box“, saying: “We have to have an economy where the decisions of a single company or a single executive do not have an extraordinary impact on online speech.”

Joel Kaplan, Meta’s head of global policy, appeared on Fox News’ “Fox and Friends” on Tuesday and said that Meta thinks the Community Notes system on Musk’s X platform has worked “really well”. Musk, who has been a vocal defender of Trump online and donated millions of dollars to his campaign, has been in close contact with the president-elect since the election.

Last week, Meta he said that Kaplan will become the company’s first policy officer, succeeding former Nick Clegg British Deputy Prime Minister and a leader of Britain’s centrist Liberal Democratic Party.

Kaplan, who has held several political positions at Meta since joining the company in 2011 when it was still called Facebook, is well known in the Republican Party. He was a White House deputy chief of staff under former President George W. Bush and also once worked as a clerk for the former Supreme Court. Antonin Scalia.

In December, Kaplan revealed in a Facebook post place that he joined Vice President-elect JD Vance and Trump during his recent visit at the New York Stock Exchange.

“We want to make it so that, basically, if you can say it on TV, say it on the floor of Congress, you certainly should be able to say it on Facebook and Instagram without fear of censorship,” Kaplan said. Tuesday.

Meta’s Supervisory Board, which provides independent oversight of the company’s content moderation, praised the company’s changes Tuesday.

“The Supervisory Board welcomes the news that Meta will review its approach to fact-checking, with the aim of finding a scalable solution to strengthen trust, freedom of speech and user voice on its platforms” , the board told CNBC in a statement, adding that “Specifically in the United States, rightly or wrongly, Meta’s previous approach was perceived as politically biased by many of its users.”

Meta has taken additional steps to appease the incoming administration in recent months. On Monday, Meta announced that Dana White, CEO of the Ultimate Fighting Championship and a longtime friend of Trump, is joining its board.

After Trump’s presidential victory in November, Zuckerberg joined a number of other big tech executives who visited the president-elect at the Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida, and in December, Meta confirmed a $1 million donation to Trump’s inaugural fund.