Meta Inc. announced Tuesday that it is ending its long-standing fact-checking program, a policy designed to curb the spread of misinformation across its social media apps. This is a clear sign that the company is repositioning itself and shifting its weight ahead of Trump's presidency. Free speech online.
Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, said it would now allow more speech, rely on users to correct inaccurate and false posts, and take a more personalized approach to political content. Ta. He expressed regret that the organization had strayed too far from its values over the past 10 years, and explained the changes.
“It's time to get back to our roots: freedom of expression,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a video announcing the changes. He added that the company's fact-checking system “has reached a point where there are too many errors and too much censorship.”
Zuckerberg acknowledged that there is more “bad stuff” on the platform as a result of this decision. “The reality is it's a trade-off,” he says. “This means less malicious material will be discovered, but it will also reduce the number of innocent posts and accounts that we accidentally delete.”
Since Donald J. Trump's victory in November, few large companies have so openly sought to curry favor with the president-elect. During his first administration, Trump accused social media platforms of censoring conservative voices. In a series of announcements during this presidential transition, Meta made a major shift in strategy in response to what Zuckerberg called a “cultural tipping point” after the election.
Zuckerberg dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago in November, after which Mehta donated $1 million to support Trump's inauguration. Mr. Zuckerberg last week promoted Joel Kaplan, Meta's top executive and closest Republican ally, to the company's most senior policy official. And Zuckerberg said Monday that Dana White, head of Ultimate Fighting Championship and a Trump ally, will join Meta's board of directors.
Mehta executives recently warned Trump officials about the policy change, a person familiar with the conversations said on condition of anonymity. The fact-checking announcement coincided with Kaplan's appearance on Trump's favorite show “Fox & Friends,” where Kaplan said there was “too much political bias” in Meta's fact-checking program.
Trump said he watched Kaplan's Fox interview and said it was “impressive” and that Mehta “has come a long way.” Trump also said Mehta's move was “probably” the result of threats against the company and Zuckerberg.
The influence of Elon Musk, the world's richest man who leads X, SpaceX, and Tesla, also had a large impact on Meta's transformation. Since acquiring X in 2022, Musk has lifted the platform's restrictions on online speech and turned to a program called Community Notes that relies on X users to police false and misleading content. Ta. Musk, who has become a key advisor to Trump, has also moved Company X to Texas and out of California, where he was based, and has criticized California's policies.
Meta said Tuesday that it would also look into a community notes program after confirming that “this approach works in X.” Additionally, Zuckerberg said his company's U.S. trust and safety and content moderation operations will be run from Texas rather than California, “where there is less concern about bias on our team.”
In an appearance on Fox on Tuesday, Kaplan pushed back against the idea that anyone is influencing Zuckerberg's decisions.
“There's no question that what's happening in the meta is coming from Mark,” Kaplan said. But, he added, “I think Elon played a very important role in moving the discussion and getting people to focus again on freedom of expression.”
Misinformation researchers said Meta's decision to end fact-checking was deeply worrying. Nicole Gill, founder and executive director of digital watchdog group Accountable Tech, said Zuckerberg is “against the same surge of hate, disinformation and conspiracy theories that sparked January 6th. “It's opening the floodgates,” he said, which continues to fuel the reality of the situation. -World violence. ”
Facebook shut down Trump's account in 2021 for inciting violence after the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, but later reinstated it. Studies have since shown that interventions like Facebook's fact-checking are effective in reducing beliefs in falsehoods and reducing the frequency with which such content is shared.
But Mr. Mehta's move infuriated Mr. Trump's conservative supporters, many of whom disliked the way Mr. Mehta added disclaimers and warnings to questionable or false posts. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) said in a post on X that Mr. Mehta “finally acknowledges speech censorship” and called the change “a huge victory for free speech.”
Other Republicans were also skeptical. Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) said in a post on X that Mehta's changes were “a ploy to avoid regulation.”
Inside Meta, Zuckerberg's announcement was met with both admiration and trepidation. For some employees, Mr. Zuckerberg is finally able to be his “authentic self,” uninhibited by “woke” critics, three current and former employees said.
Despite his efforts to moderate content, some said Mr. Zuckerberg was throwing current and former employees under the bus. When upset employees posted about the changes on company bulletin boards, human resources officials quickly removed the posts for violating company policy rules regarding community engagement, the people said. Meta introduced this policy in 2022 to keep controversial social issues out of the workplace.
Mr. Mehta's decision to move his moderation team from California to Texas to “eliminate bias” drew particular attention within the company, he said. The company has long had employees working on moderation topics in Texas, officials said. In private channels and group chats, some people said it was OK to criticize Meta's free speech policies, as long as they didn't criticize it from within the company.
Meta's fact-checking policy was born out of Trump's victory in the last presidential election in 2016. At the time, Facebook was criticized for the unchecked spread of misinformation across its network, including posts from foreign governments aimed at sowing discord among Americans. .
Under tremendous pressure from the public, Mr. Zuckerberg worked with outside organizations such as The Associated Press, ABC News, and fact-checking site Snopes, as well as other global organizations vetted by the International Fact-Checking Network, to identify false or We have scrutinized posts that may be misleading. Facebook and Instagram will decide whether you need to annotate or remove it.
Over the next eight years, the company invested billions of dollars, thousands of people, and dedicated vast technical resources to solving the content moderation problem. Mr. Zuckerberg has hired more than a dozen outside companies to help fill police posts, bringing in contractors from companies such as Accenture to do much of the manual work of vetting the posts.
Zuckerberg also emphasized the importance of artificial intelligence in addressing many of these issues, given that nearly half of the planet's population regularly posts on Meta's app.
But over time, Mr. Zuckerberg became increasingly frustrated with the lack of recognition his company was getting as he tried to quash misinformation, according to two people close to the chief executive. He said he felt that the time and effort Meta had put into the effort was diminishing returns.
Zuckerberg expressed that frustration in a speech he gave at Georgetown University in 2019, saying he didn't want his social network to become an “arbiter of speech.” He said Facebook was founded to give people a voice, and in doing so, critics who attacked it were setting a dangerous precedent.
Zuckerberg also regrets the pressure the Biden administration has put on him to remove coronavirus-related content, a sentiment he publicly expressed in a letter to Congress last year. In his letter, Zuckerberg said the administration had gone too far in demanding the removal of content that “contains humor or satire.” In retrospect, Mehta should have pushed back more on the White House's demands, he said.
By 2022, Meta began to cull parts of its content management and policy teams as part of the company's broader cost-cutting efforts. The company continues to make strategic reductions.
Among the changes announced Tuesday was the removal of restrictions on topics such as immigration and gender identity, which Zuckerberg said are “out of step with mainstream discourse.” Mehta said the company will gradually start introducing more personalized political content based on the signals people give about what they want to see in their feeds.
Mr. Zuckerberg has also evolved personally. In recent years, he has become more immersed in the right-leaning environment of professional martial arts, becoming closer to Mr. White in the Ultimate Fighting Championship. He is tired of the constant attacks on him and his company and frustrated with dealing with Biden's aggressive approach to reining in the tech industry, two people familiar with his thinking said. spoke.
Best of all, thanks to the incoming Trump administration and its emphasis on free speech, Mehta will finally be relieved of its Sisyphean duties overseeing the billions of posts flowing through the app.
“We have a new administration that is very supportive of free expression, far from forcing companies to censor themselves,” Kaplan said on Fox. “It brings us back to the values that Mark founded the company on.”
Kate Conger and Stuart A. Thompson contributed reporting.
