The Japan Times - Meta abruptly ends US fact-checks ahead of Trump term

"We're going to get rid of fact-checkers (that) have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they've created, especially in the US," Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a post.

Instead, Meta platforms, including Facebook and Instagram, "would use community notes similar to X (formerly Twitter), starting in the US," he added.

Meta's surprise announcement echoed long-standing complaints made by Trump's Republican Party and X owner Elon Musk about fact-checking that many conservatives see as censorship.

They argue that fact-checking programs disproportionately target right-wing voices, which has led to proposed laws in states like Florida and Texas to limit content moderation.

Zuckerberg said that "recent elections feel like a cultural tipping point towards, once again, prioritizing speech" over moderation.

The shift came as the 40-year-old tycoon has been making efforts to reconcile with Trump since his election in November, including donating one million dollars to his inauguration fund.

Trump has been a harsh critic of Meta and Zuckerberg for years, accusing the company of bias against him.

The Republican was kicked off Facebook following the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol, though the company restored his account in early 2023.

Zuckerberg dined with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort in November in a sign of strengthening ties.

- Ending 'Facebook jail' -

In another recent gesture towards the Trump team, Meta last week named Joel Kaplan, a former Republican official, to head up public affairs at the company, taking over from Nick Clegg, a former British deputy prime minister.

"Too much harmless content gets censored, too many people find themselves wrongly locked up in 'Facebook jail,'" Kaplan said in a statement, insisting that the company's approach to content moderation had "gone too far."

In his moves towards Republicans, Zuckerberg also named Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) head Dana White, a close ally of Trump, to the Meta board.

As part of the overhaul, Meta said it will relocate its trust and safety teams from liberal California to more conservative Texas.

"That will help us build trust to do this work in places where there is less concern about the bias of our teams," Zuckerberg said.

Zuckerberg also took a shot at the European Union "that has an ever increasing number of laws institutionalizing censorship and making it difficult to build anything innovative there."

This made reference to new laws in Europe that require Meta and other major platforms to maintain content moderation standards or risk hefty fines.

Zuckerberg said that Meta would "work with President Trump to push back against foreign governments going after American companies to censor more."

Additionally, Meta announced it would reverse its 2021 policy of reducing political content across its platforms.

Instead, the company will adopt a more personalized approach, allowing users greater control over the amount of political content they see on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads.

AFP currently works in 26 languages with Facebook's fact-checking program, in which Facebook pays to use fact-checks from around 80 organizations globally on its platform, WhatsApp and on Instagram.

In that program, content rated "false" is downgraded in news feeds so fewer people will see it and if someone tries to share that post, they are presented with an article explaining why it is misleading.

- Community Notes -

Community Notes on X (formerly Twitter) allows users to collaboratively add context to posts in a system that aims to distil reliable information through consensus rather than top-down moderation.

Meta's move into fact-checking came in the wake of Trump's shock election in 2016, which critics said was enabled by rampant disinformation on Facebook and interference by foreign actors like Russia on the platform.

K.Okada--JT