Meta’s chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said he would scrap a longstanding fact-checking program and replace it with X-style community notes from users.
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The first time Lead Stories fact-checker Maarten Schenk learned of Meta’s plan to scrap its partnership with independent journalists was the social networks’ press release. “We were not notified in advance so it was just boom this is ending,” Shenk told Forbes.
Others who were told — some who’d worked to fight misinformation and abuse on the company’s various platforms for almost a decade — were given less than an hour’s notice. They were blindsided by the move, as were some organizations who had signed fact-checking contract extensions with Meta just weeks earlier.
Meta told fact-checkers that contracts with American news organizations like USA Today, Reuters Fact Check, AFP and not-for-profit Politifact would end in March, according to several fact-checkers involved in the discussions. Deals with international newsrooms and charities running fact-checking projects from Australia to Zambia are expected to run until the end of the year.
The shuttering of the Meta’s fact-checking program across Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp will likely have a deleterious effect on some newsrooms and not-for-profits who’d relied on it for income. Meta claimed in 2022 to have spent $100 million on the program since 2016 and extended it to some 115 countries. Meta did not respond to a request for comment by the deadline.
The company’s decision to trade independent fact checking for community content policing was announced on Tuesday in a blog post by Joel Kaplan, the company’s new global policy chief. He wrote that some of Meta’s content moderation policies had been developed “partly in response to societal and political pressure to moderate content,” saying these “increasingly complex systems” had “gone too far” and branding them as “censorship.”
The claim that Meta’s fact-checking program was politically biased, or amounted to censorship, rankled many of the fact-checkers that had worked with Meta, and spoke with Forbes. “Fact-checking journalism has never censored or removed posts: it’s added information and context to controversial claims, and it’s debunked hoax content,” said Angie Holan, director of the International Fact-Checking Network.
Indeed, Facebook’s own rules stipulate that only the company can moderate or remove posts. “We did not, and could not, remove content,” said Lori Robertson of Factcheck.org, another of Meta’s U.S.-based third-party fact-checkers. “Any decisions to do that were Meta’s.”
The abandonment of third-party fact-checking by Meta, which claims to have three billion users across Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, follows Kaplan taking over as chief of global affairs this month. The former senior advisor to President George W. Bush and longtime Republican lobbyist replaced Nick Clegg in the role.
The move is another in a series that appears calculated to appease the incoming Trump administration. The company will also move its content moderation team to Texas from California and recently softened its rules around hate speech against immigrants, women and transgender people. On Monday, Zuckerberg revealed that he’d tapped UFC president Dana White, a prominent Trump supporter, to join his board of directors.
Responding to Meta’s fact checking announcement, President Trump said the company has “come a long way,” and speculated that Zuckerberg “probably” enacted the changes in direct response to threats from the president-elect. Trump had claimed without evidence that the Facebook founder had plotted against in the 2020 election, and warned he would “spend the rest of his life in prison” if he intervened in 2024’s presidential election. Meta is also facing a Federal Trade Commission court hearing in April that calls for the breakup of the $1.57 billion group.
In seeking to appeal to the incoming Trump Administration, Zuckerberg could be setting up a likely future conflict with the European Union over moderation. Europe’s regulators are already investigating Elon Musk’s X over claims that it has violated the Digital Services Act by failing to remove posts that contained illegal content.
“Europe has an ever increasing number of laws, institutionalizing censorship, making it difficult to build anything innovative there,” said Zuckerberg in the video post where he can be seen wearing a $900,000 watch. “The only way we can push back on this trend is with the support of the U.S. government.”