To avoid what it calls “biases”, the owner of Facebook and Instagram will have community ratings like X’s, instead of outsourced fact-checking. Zuckerberg’s justification coincides with speeches by Trump and Musk.
The Meta company will end its outsourced fact-checking program in the United States. In its place, it will adopt community notes authored by users themselves, similar to those of the X platform, announced its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, on Tuesday (07/01).
According to the owner of the social networks Facebook and Instagram, “fact-checkers have simply been too politically biased, destroying more trust than they created”.
Meta’s announcement echoes many of the complaints from Republican politicians and X owner Elon Musk, who have equated fact-checking programs with a form of censorship.
Zuckerberg himself conceded that the changes are partly driven by political events, including Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential election: “The recent election also feels like a cultural turning point, in the sense of re-prioritizing discourse.”
Meta’s platforms, especially Facebook and Instagram, are going to “simplify” their content policies, the 40-year-old tycoon said in an online video, and “get rid of a lot of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender, which are simply out of touch with mainstream discourse”.
Thus, the social media giant would allow “more speech” in order to focus on illegal content or “highly serious violations” such as terrorism, child sexual exploitation and drug trafficking.
When announcing the change, Zuckerberg also said that “Latin American countries have secret courts that can order companies to remove content silently”. He didn’t mention which countries he was referring to, but it’s a similar argument to that adopted by Musk in relation to the actions of the Supreme Court, which even took down X in Brazil at the end of October after the company failed to obey court orders, a block that lasted around 40 days.
Network of verifiers criticizes rule change
The director of the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN), Angie Drobnic Holan, said that Meta’s decision will “harm social media users who are looking for accurate and reliable information to make decisions about their daily lives”. “Fact-checking journalism has never censored or removed posts, it has added information and context to controversial claims and debunked false content and conspiracy theories.”
She also said she found it “regrettable” that Meta’s decision was taken “in the wake of extreme political pressure from a new government and its supporters”. “The fact-checkers were not biased in their work – this line of attack comes from those who think they should be allowed to exaggerate and lie without rebuttal or contradiction.”
The news agencies Agence France-Presse (AFP) and Associated Press (AP) are among the press outlets that have been fact-checking for Meta.
For João Brant, secretary of digital policies at the Presidency of the Republic of Brazil, Zuckerberg’s announcement anticipates the start of the Trump administration and makes explicit Meta’s “alliance” with the next American government. “Meta will act politically at the international level in conjunction with the Trump administration to combat policies in Europe, Brazil and other countries that seek to balance rights in the online environment,” he said on X.
Brant is one of the Brazilian government representatives involved in negotiating the bill that creates the Brazilian Law on Internet Freedom, Responsibility and Transparency, which was shelved by Congress in June. The text is partly inspired by the European Union (EU) standard on the subject, the DSA (Digital Service Act).
Meta aligns itself with Trump 2.0
Trump had harshly criticized Meta and Zuckerberg, accusing them of supporting liberal policies with an anti-conservative bias. After storming the Capitol on January 6, 2021, at the end of his first term, the New York tycoon was expelled from Facebook, but was reinstated in early 2023.
In an apparent attempt to mend the relationship between his company and the president-elect, in November 2024 Zuckerberg had dinner with Trump at the latter’s estate in Mar-a-Lago, Florida. Another conciliatory gesture was the recent appointment of Dana White, president of a martial arts organization and a staunch Trump supporter, to the board of Meta.
Even more relevant was the hiring of hardline Republican Joel Kaplan as Director of Global Affairs, replacing former British Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg. “Too much harmless content is censored, too many people find themselves unjustly locked up in ‘Facebook prison’,” the lobbyist and lawyer said recently. The previous scheme, of creating complex systems to manage content, would have “gone too far”, resulting in “too many mistakes”.
Kaplan defended the new strategy of eliminating external experts: “We’ve seen this approach at X, where they empower the community to decide to what extent posts are potentially misleading and need more context.”
As part of the restructuring, Meta will relocate its trust and safety teams from the state of California, where liberal positions predominate, to Texas, which is more conservative. “This will help build trust to do this work in places where there is less concern about the bias of our teams,” said Zuckerberg.
Meta’s quasi-independent Supervisory Board, set up to arbitrate on controversial content decisions, said it welcomed the measures and looked forward to collaborating with the company “to understand the changes in more detail, ensuring that the new approach is as effective and speech-friendly as possible”.