Meta announces ending fact-checking program in the US

WASHINGTON: Social media giant Meta announced Tuesday a significant rollback of its content moderation policies, including the termination of its third-party fact-checking program in the United States.

“We’re going to get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with community notes similar to X (formerly Twitter), starting in the US,” Meta Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a post on social media.

Zuckerberg said that “fact checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created, especially in the US.”

Meta’s announcement repeated many of the complaints made by Republicans and X-owner Elon Musk about fact-checking programs that many conservatives see as censorship.

The 40-year-old tycoon said that “recent elections feel like a cultural tipping point towards, once again, prioritizing speech.”

The shift came as Zuckerberg has been making efforts to reconcile with US President-elect Donald Trump, including donating one million dollars to his inauguration fund.

Zuckerberg also said Meta sites, including Facebook and Instagram, would “simplify” their content policies “and get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse.”

Trump has been a harsh critic of Meta and Zuckerberg in recent years, accusing the company of supporting liberal policies and being biased against conservatives.

The Republican was kicked off Facebook following the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol, though the company restored his account in early 2023.

Zuckerberg also dined with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort in November, as he looks to repair the company’s relationship with the incoming US leader following the presidential election.

In another recent gesture towards the Trump team, Meta last week named Republican stalwart Joel Kaplan to head up public affairs at the company, taking over from Nick Clegg, a former British deputy prime minister.

“Too much harmless content gets censored, too many people find themselves wrongly locked up in ‘Facebook jail,’” Kaplan said in a statement, insisting that its current approach to content moderation has “gone too far.”

Zuckerberg also named Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) head Dana White, a close ally of Trump, to the Meta board.

As part of the overhaul, Meta said it will relocate its trust and safety teams from California, where liberal views are commonplace, to more conservative Texas.

“That will help us build trust to do this work in places where there is less concern about the bias of our teams,” Zuckerberg said.

Additionally, Meta announced it would reverse its 2021 policy of reducing political content across its platforms.

Instead, the company will adopt a more personalized approach, allowing users greater control over the amount of political content they see on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads.

AFP currently works in 26 languages with Facebook’s fact-checking program, in which Facebook pays to use fact-checks from around 80 organizations globally on its platform, WhatsApp and on Instagram.