Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is nixing Facebook’s fact checkers and replacing them with community notes, a feature used by Elon Musk’s X platform where users highlight posts they deem misleading or needing more context. The shift away from the existing system of fact checking, which was widely panned by Donald Trump and others known for spreading false claims, is another yet another sign that Zuckerberg is positioning himself to earn the president-elect’s favor.
The community notes feature will also apply to Instagram and Threads, two other social media platforms owned by Meta.
“We need to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies, and restoring free expression on our platforms,” Zuckerberg said on Fox News. “More specifically, we’re going to get rid of fact checkers, and replace them with community notes, similar to X.”
The move comes after Zuckerberg hired Joel Kaplan, a well-connected Republican, to serve as his company’s policy chief in what many analysts interpreted as an effort to build relationships in Trump’s Washington. The changes announced Tuesday will mean lifting restrictions “on some topics that are part of mainstream discourse” and will focus the company’s “enforcement on illegal and high-severity violations,” Kaplan explained in a blog post.
The decision also comes after Zuckerberg met with Trump at the latter’s Mar-a-Lago resort in December and donated $1 million to his inauguration committee.
Zuckerberg was explicit in stating that the elimination of fact-checkers is a response to the change in public discourse underscored by the second election of Trump, whose first election in 2016 was followed shortly after by Facebook instituting the fact checkers. Now, Zuckerberg is saying that those fact checkers are “too politically biased” and have destroyed “more trust than they’ve created,” saying he’d also move his moderation staff from California to Texas, which will “help remove the concern that biased employees are overly censoring content.”
“The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards, once again, prioritizing speech,” he added.
