Zuckerberg Axes Facebook Fact-Checkers, Claims ‘Censorship’

Meta Platforms has opted to follow the controversial approach of Elon Musk to its principle social media platform Facebook, by stating it will drop its fact-checking programme.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced in a video “it is time to get back to our roots around free expression. We’re replacing fact checkers with Community Notes…”

Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter) had implemented Community Notes when it axed its content moderation teams, but some watchdogs have alleged the crowd-sourced fact-checking program does not address misinformation on that platform.

Axing fact checking

Despite that, Zuckerberg’s announcement that it is ending third party fact-checking program and moving to a Community Notes model, will apparently “allow more speech by lifting restrictions on some topics that are part of mainstream discourse and focusing our enforcement on illegal and high-severity violations.”

The platform said that 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.”

“When we launched our independent fact checking program in 2016, we were very clear that we didn’t want to be the arbiters of truth,” Meta said. “We made what we thought was the best and most reasonable choice at the time, which was to hand that responsibility over to independent fact checking organisations.”

But Meta said that “experts, like everyone else, have their own biases and perspectives. This showed up in the choices some made about what to fact check and how. Over time we ended up with too much content being fact checked that people would understand to be legitimate political speech and debate.”

It should be noted that fact-checking organisationss have strongly denied these allegations.

“We are now changing this approach,” Meta stated. “We will end the current third party fact checking program in the United States and instead begin moving to a Community Notes program. We’ve seen this approach work on X – where they empower their community to decide when posts are potentially misleading and need more context, and people across a diverse range of perspectives decide what sort of context is helpful for other users to see. We think this could be a better way of achieving our original intention of providing people with information about what they’re seeing – and one that’s less prone to bias.”

Meta said it plans to phase in Community Notes in the US first over the next couple of months, and will continue to improve it over the course of the year.

Content moderation teams would also be moved from California to Texas “where there is less concern about the bias of our teams”, said Zuckerberg in a five-minute video statement.

Major step back

But critics of Meta’s decision labelled the move to drop fact checking to “prioritise free speech”, as a “major step back” for public discourse.

Nina Jankowicz, a former US government official tasked with fighting disinformation, described the move as “a full bending of the knee to Trump”, the Guardian reported.

Global Witness, a human rights group, reportedly added: “Zuckerberg’s announcement is a blatant attempt to cozy up to the incoming Trump administration – with harmful implications. These changes will make it more dangerous for women, LGBT+ people, people of colour, scientists and activists to speak out online, where they already face disproportionate harassment and attacks.”

The Centre for Information Resilience, an organisation whose activities include tracking online hate speech and disinformation based on people’s gender, ethnicity and sexuality, reportedly warned it was a “major step back for content moderation at a time when disinformation and harmful content are evolving faster than ever”.

Chris Morris, the chief executive of the UK fact-checking organisation Full Fact, which has been funded by Meta to check Facebook content, reportedly called the announcement “a backwards step that risks a chilling effect around the world”.

He told the Guardian his organisation’s fact-checkers assessed claims “from all political stripes with equal rigour, and hold those in power to account through our commitment to truth”.

“Locking fact-checkers out of the conversation won’t help society to turn the tide on rapidly rising misinformation,” he said.

Currying favour?

There has been a remarkable change to Meta’s dealings with Donald Trump.

Indeed, Mark Zuckerberg has carried out a number of changes to his business empire following Trump’s election victory.

This includes donating $1 million to President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration fund, and Zuckerberg having dinner at Mar-a-Lago.

More recently Meta’s president of global affairs Nick Clegg (former a UK deputy prime minister), announced he is to leave the company and will hand over his position to Joel Kaplan, a prominent Republican, in a move seen as a changing of the guard.

Then this week Meta Platforms said it has elected a close friend of US president-elect Donald Trump to its board of directors, along with two others.

Dana White, chief executive of Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), has a long relationship with Trump and spoke in support of Trump’s election campaign in 2016, 2020 and 2024.