Meta Tuesday announcement it will eliminate its third-party fact-checking program to “restore free speech” and move to a “Community Notes” model, similar to the system that exists on Elon Muskthe X platform.
The company said that Community Ratings would be written and rated by contributing users to provide more context to posts on its platforms, and that the feature would be rolled out in the United States over the coming months. The announcement marks Meta’s latest attempt to smooth relations with the Republican president-elect. Donald Trump before he takes office.
“We’ve reached a point where there are simply too many errors and too much censorship,” says Meta’s CEO. Mark Zuckerberg said Tuesday in a video announcement. “The recent election also appears to be a cultural shift toward a new priority on speech. So we will return to our roots and focus on reducing errors, simplifying our policies, and restoring free speech to our platforms.”
Zuckerberg said third-party fact-checkers were “too politically biased” and had “destroyed more trust than they created, particularly in the United States.”
Zuckerberg has had a rocky relationship with Trump over the years, with the president-elect and other Republicans saying Facebook and other sites were censoring conservative views. Trump recently called Facebook the “enemy of the people” during a March speech. interview with CNBC.
Facebook removed aggressively “Stop the Steal” content following the January 6, 2021 insurrection, citing “continued attempts to organize events against the outcome of the U.S. presidential election that may lead to violence” on the social media platform.
Meta also perceived a two-year suspension on Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts shortly after the company determined that the former president’s actions following the Jan. 6 riots in Washington, D.C., could potentially incite more violence.
Meta said it will simplify its content policies in the future by removing restrictions on topics such as immigration and gender and implementing a new policy enforcement approach that will focus on illegal violations. and high gravity. The company is moving its trust, safety and content moderation teams from California, a historically Democratic state, to Texas, a historically Republican state.
“We will work with President Trump to push back against governments around the world that are going after American businesses and pushing for increased censorship,” Zuckerberg said.
Trump praised Meta’s announcement during a press conference Tuesday. Asked if he thought Zuckerberg was “directly responding to threats you’ve made to him in the past,” Trump said, “Probably.”
“Honestly, I think they’ve come a long way — Meta, Facebook, I think they’ve come a long way,” Trump said.
In 2023, Trump regained access to his Facebook and Instagram accounts, but he also faced some potential restrictions and sanctions if it violated the company’s community guidelines. Meta finally removed restrictions on Trump’s account in July, ahead of the 2024 US presidential election.
House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, subpoenaed Zuckerberg and other tech CEOs in 2023 as part of an investigation aimed at “understanding how and to what extent the executive branch coerced and collaborated with companies and other intermediaries to censor speech.”
Federal Trade Commission Chairwoman Lina Khan addressed Meta’s announcement in an interview Tuesday on CNBC.Scream box“, stating: “We should have an economy in which the decisions of a single company or a single executive do not have an extraordinary impact on speech online. “
Joel Kaplan, Meta’s head of global policy, appeared on Fox News’ “Fox and Friends” on Tuesday and said Meta believes the Community Notes system on Musk’s X platform works “very well.” Musk, who has been a vocal supporter of Trump online and donated millions of dollars to his campaign, has been in close contact with the president-elect since the election.
Last week, Meta said that Kaplan would become the company’s top policymaker, succeeding Nick Clegg, former British Deputy Prime Minister and a leader of the centrist British Liberal Democrat party.
Kaplan, who has held several political positions at Meta since joining the company in 2011, when it was still called Facebook, is well known within the Republican Party. He served as deputy White House chief of staff under former President George W. Bush and also worked as a law clerk for former Supreme Court Justice George W. Bush. Antonin Scalia.
In December, Kaplan revealed on Facebook job that he joined Vice President-elect JD Vance and Trump during their recent visit on the New York Stock Exchange.
“We want to make sure that at the end of the day, if you can say it on television, you say it in Congress, you can certainly say it on Facebook and Instagram without fear of censorship,” Kaplan said. Tuesday.
Meta’s Oversight Board, which provides independent oversight of the company’s content moderation, on Tuesday welcomed the company’s changes.
“The Oversight Board welcomes the announcement that Meta will review its approach to fact-checking, aiming to find a scalable solution to improve trust, free speech and user voice on its platforms “, the board told CNBC in a statement, adding that “Particularly in the United States, rightly or wrongly, Meta’s previous approach has been perceived as politically biased by many of its users.”
Meta has taken additional steps to appease the new administration in recent months. On Monday, Meta announced that Dana White, CEO of the Ultimate Fighting Championship and longtime friend of Trump, was joining its board of directors.
Following Trump’s presidential victory in November, Zuckerberg joined a number of other top tech executives who visit the president-elect of the Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Fla., and in December, Meta confirmed a $1 million donation to Trump’s inaugural fund.
