Mark Zuckerberg Announces Meta Will Dump 'Politically Biased' Fact-Checkers
Mark Zuckerberg announced Meta is abandoning its fact-checking program as he criticized the system for becoming “too politically biased.”
The tech billionaire unveiled the changes in a video on Tuesday. Zuckerberg said his companies — which include Facebook and Instagram — would instead implement a “community notes” model similar to the one used on X, which is owned by Elon Musk.
The policy shift comes as tech companies attempt to curry favor with President-elect Donald Trump following the Republican’s election triumph in November.
“After Trump first got elected in 2016, the legacy media wrote non-stop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy,” Meta’s chief executive said. “We tried, in good faith, to address those concerns without becoming the arbiters of truth, but the fact-checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created, especially in the U.S.”
Starting in the U.S., Meta will end its fact-checking program with independent third parties and pivot to “community notes,” a system that relies on users adding notes or corrections to posts that may contain false or misleading information.
Zuckerberg also indicated a new direction on speech, announcing Meta will also “remove restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are out of touch with mainstream discourse.”
“What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas,” Zuckerberg said. “And it’s gone too far. So I want to make sure that people can share their beliefs and experiences on our platforms.”
He conceded that there would be more “bad stuff” on the platform as a result of the decisions. “The reality is that this is a trade-off,” he said.
Here is the full video from Mark Zuckerberg announcing the end of censorship and misinformation policies.
I highly recommend you watch all of it as tonally it is one of the biggest indications of "elections have consequences" I have ever seen pic.twitter.com/aYpkxrTqWe— Saagar Enjeti (@esaagar) January 7, 2025
The move comes as Zuckerberg apparently looks to repair his relationship with the incoming president.
Meta banned Trump from Facebook and Instagram following the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
But the Facebook co-founder met with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida after the election, and Meta recently donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund.
Dana White, the president and CEO of UFC and a longtime Trump friend, was just appointed to Meta’s board of directors, the company announced Monday.
White’s inclusion comes days after Zuckerberg named Republican Joel Kaplan, a former senior adviser to President George W. Bush, as Meta’s head of policy.
Other big names in Silicon Valley — including Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and OpenAI’s Sam Altman — have sought to boost their standing with Trump by way of donations and face-to-face meetings.
On Friday, a Washington Post editorial cartoonist revealed that she was leaving the newspaper after it rejected a sketch depicting Bezos, its billionaire owner, on bended knee for Trump.
Following the Meta announcement, the chair of the Federal Trade Commission questioned whether attempts to woo Trump would lead to tech companies securing a “sweetheart deal” in antitrust cases brought by her agency.
Meta will face trial in April over the FTC’s allegations that it bought Instagram and WhatsApp to push out competition.
Lina Khan, a Biden appointee, told CNBC that the commission had been “very successful” in its litigation against Amazon and Facebook.
She added, “And so it’s only going to be natural that those companies are going to want to come in and see, can they get some type of sweetheart deal, right?”
Asked if she thought that would happen under Trump, Khan said, “I hope it won’t.”
