Meta to end fact-checking program in Shift Ahead of Trump Term

Meta on Tuesday announced a set of changes to its content moderation practices that would effectively end its long-standing fact-checking program, a policy put in place to curb the spread of misinformation across its social media apps.

The reversal of the year-old policy is a stark sign of how the company is repositioning itself for the Trump era. Meta described the changes with the language of a mea culpa, saying the company had strayed too far from its values ​​over the previous decade.

“We want to undo the mission creep that has made our rules too restrictive and too prone to over-enforcement,” Joel Kaplan, Meta’s newly installed head of global policy, said in a statement.

Instead of using news organizations and other third-party groups, Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and Threads, will rely on users to add notes or corrections to posts that may contain false or misleading information.

Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s CEO, said in a video that the new protocol, which will begin in the US in the coming months, is similar to the one used by X, called Community Notes.

“It is time to return to our roots around free speech,” said Mr. Zuckerberg. The company’s current fact-checking system, he added, had “reached a point where it’s just too many errors and too much censorship.”

Mr. Zuckerberg admitted that there would be more “bad stuff” on the platform as a result of the decision. “The reality is this is a trade-off,” he said. “This means we’ll catch less bad stuff, but we’ll also reduce the number of innocent people’s posts and accounts we accidentally remove.”

Elon Musk has relied on Community Notes to flag misleading posts on X. Since taking over the social network, Mr. Musk, a major Trump donor, increasingly positioned X as the platform behind the new Trump presidency.

Meta’s move is likely to please the administration of President-elect Donald J. Trump and its conservative allies, many of whom have disliked Meta’s practice of adding disclaimers or warnings to questionable or false posts. Mr. Trump has long spoken out against Mr. Zuckerberg and claims that the fact-checking feature treated posts from conservative users unfairly.

Since Mr. Trump won a second term in November, Meta has moved quickly to try to repair the strained relationship he and his company have with conservatives.

Mr. Zuckerberg noted that the “recent election” felt like a “cultural tipping point toward once again prioritizing speech.”

At the end of November, Mr. Zuckerberg with Mr. Trump at Mar-a-Lago, where he also met with his chosen Secretary of State, Marco Rubio. Meta donated $1 million to support Mr. Trump’s inauguration in December. Last week, Mr. Zuckerberg Mr. Kaplan, a longtime conservative and the highest-ranking Meta executive closest to the Republican Party, to the company’s top political role. And on Monday, Mr. Zuckerberg that Dana White, the head of the Ultimate Fighting Championship and a close ally of Mr. Trumps, would join Meta’s board.

Meta bosses recently gave a heads-up to Trump officials about the change in policy, according to a person with knowledge of the conversations, who spoke on condition of anonymity. The fact-check announcement coincided with an appearance by Mr. Kaplan on “Fox & Friends,” a favorite show of Mr. Trump. He told the hosts of the morning show, popular with conservatives, that there was “too much political bias” in the fact-checking program.

The change ends a practice the company started eight years ago, in the weeks after Mr. Trump’s election in 2016. At the time, Facebook was under fire for the uncontrolled dissemination of misinformation spread across its network, including posts by foreign governments angling to sow discord among the American public.

As a result of enormous public pressure, Mr. Zuckerberg reached out to outside organizations such as The Associated Press, ABC News and the fact-checking site Snopes, along with other global organizations investigated by the International Fact-Checking Network, to identify potentially false or misleading posts on Facebook and Instagram and determine whether they must be commented out or removed.

Among the changes, said Mr. Zuckerberg, will be to “remove restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are out of touch with mainstream discourse.” He also said the trust and safety and content moderation teams would be moved from California, with US content review moving to Texas. That would “help eliminate concerns that biased employees are excessively censoring content,” he added.