Meta ends fact-checking program as it shifts closer to Trump and Elon Musk’s platform

Just days after Joel Kaplan, a former advisor to president George W. Bush and a close associate of President-elect Donald Trump, joined Meta, Mark Zuckerberg’s social network made a controversial decision: it ended its fact-checking program. The social media giant will cease using content moderators and, like its competitor X, will instead rely on users to add notes or corrections to posts. Kaplan took over from Nick Clegg, the former British deputy prime minister, as head of global affairs just four days earlier, a move seen as part of Meta’s efforts to foster closer ties with Trump.

Kaplan posted the reasons for the decision on Facebook’s blog: “In recent years, we’ve developed increasingly complex systems to manage content across our platforms, partly in response to societal and political pressure to moderate content. This approach has gone too far. As well-intentioned as many of these efforts have been, they have expanded over time to the point where we are making too many mistakes, frustrating our users and too often getting in the way of the free expression we set out to enable. Too much harmless content gets censored, too many people find themselves wrongly locked up in ‘Facebook jail,’ and we are often too slow to respond when they do.”

In this way, Meta aligns itself with the model championed by Trump and his recently appointed head of the Department of Government Efficiency, Elon Musk — owner of Tesla and X — who removed moderation after acquiring the social network.

Kaplan has invoked freedom of expression as the rationale behind the move. “On platforms where billions of people can have a voice, all the good, bad and ugly is on display. But that’s free expression,” he said in his post.

With that in mind, Meta has announced the end of its third-party fact-checking program, which has been active since 2016, and the shift to community notes.

The program originally relied on independent fact-checking organizations to verify, clarify, label, and limit information posted on the social network. “Over time, we ended up with too much content being fact checked,” said Kaplan. “A program intended to inform too often became a tool to censor.”

Independent verification will be replaced by a system similar to X’s, effectively abandoning content moderation. The new model, called Community Notes, shifts the responsibility of rating posts to users, and requires their collective agreement for any decision to be effective.

Starting today, the platform for joining the Community Notes initiative is open on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. It will launch in the United States in the coming months and expand to other countries thereafter.

In this way, the system that allowed millions of posts to be deleted (around 1% of content, according to Meta) is being phased out, with the justification that it was “limiting legitimate political debate and censoring too much trivial content.”

The change will primarily impact highly sensitive content, where conspiracy theories and misinformation are a daily occurrence. “We’re getting rid of a number of restrictions on topics like immigration, gender identity and gender that are the subject of frequent political discourse and debate. It’s not right that things can be said on TV or the floor of Congress, but not on our platforms. These policy changes may take a few weeks to be fully implemented,” said Meta’s new global affairs director.

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