Some Republicans in Congress on Tuesday celebrated Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement that its platforms, including Facebook, Instagram and Threads, would roll back moderation and stop putting labels on content fact-checking partners deem misinformation.
Zuckerberg and the company said Meta had “gone too far” in its attempts to control the spread of misinformation, with third-party fact-checking organizations being “too politically biased.” In recent years, starting in Donald Trump’s first term in the White House, Meta has blurred images and affixed labels to posts that include misinformation, like viral hoaxes. The descriptions in the labels were written and contributed to by third-party fact-checkers. When a post had a label, it often affected the post’s distribution, meaning fewer people would see it.
Zuckerberg said Tuesday that the process had led to censorship and quelled “legitimate political speech and debate.” Instead, Meta now plans to embrace a “Community Notes” style of moderation, similar to the one on Elon Musk’s X.
Fox News reporter Brooke Singman said Trump responded to Zuckerberg’s announcement by saying that he “thought their presentation was excellent” and that “they have come a long way.” Musk posted on X, “This is cool.”
The changes will start in the United States and affect 10 partner organizations Meta relied on for fact-checking, including the news organizations Agence France-Presse, Reuters and USA Today, the conservative outlets The Dispatch and Check Your Fact, the Spanish-language organization TelevisaUnivision and the independent fact-checking groups Factcheck.org, Lead Stories, PolitiFact and Science Feedback.
“Fact-based journalism is what USA TODAY does best,” the newspaper told NBC News in a statement. “We are the nation’s trusted news source because we provide unbiased and essential content for all people. Truth and facts serve everyone — not the right or the left — and that’s what we will continue to deliver.”
AFP said it and other fact-checking groups were taken by surprise. “We’ve learned the news as everyone has today,” it said. “It’s a hard hit for the fact-checking community and journalism. We’re assessing the situation.”
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Other organizations pushed back against some of Zuckerberg’s statements.
“Let’s speak plainly. Journalists at PolitiFact have never removed or censored content,” PolitiFact editor-in-chief Katie Sanders said, adding that the organization will continue its fact-checking operations independently.
Lead Stories went into further detail in a post about Meta’s announcement about its history with Meta, the standards it followed from the International Fact-Checking Network and its disagreements with Zuckerberg’s assessment.
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“In all the years we have been part of the partnership, we or the IFCN never received any complaints from Meta about any political bias, so we were quite surprised by this statement,” co-founder Maarten Schenk wrote. He also said that in the Community Notes system on X that Meta plans to emulate, notes are “often slow to appear, sometimes downright inaccurate and unlikely to appear on controversial posts because of an inability to reach agreement or consensus among users.”
“Ultimately, the truth doesn’t care about consensus or agreement: the shape of the Earth stays the same even if social media users can’t agree on it,” Schenk wrote. “We would also like to note that X’s Community Note system is entirely non-transparent about its contributors: readers are left guessing about their bias, funding, allegiance, sources or expertise and there is no way for appeals or corrections.”
The fact-checking network’s director, Angie Drobnic Holan, said in a statement that Meta’s decision “will hurt social media users who are looking for accurate, reliable information to make decisions about their everyday lives and interactions with friends and family.” She wrote that fact-checking journalism has “never censored or removed posts,” only “added information and context” and debunked “hoax content and conspiracy theories.” Business Insider reported that the IFCN scheduled an emergency meeting for Wednesday.
“It’s unfortunate that this decision comes in the wake of extreme political pressure from a new administration and its supporters,” Holan wrote. “Factcheckers have not been biased in their work -- that attack line comes from those who feel they should be able to exaggerate and lie without rebuttal or contradiction.”
Reuters declined to comment.
Many Republicans were quick to frame Meta’s announcement as an acknowledgment of efforts to censor conservative speech. Brendan Carr, Trump’s incoming head of the Federal Communications Commission, posted on X that “Facebook’s announcements is a good step in the right direction,” adding, “The work continues until the censorship cartel is completely dismantled and destroyed.”
Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., said on X that Meta “finally admits to censoring speech ... what a great birthday present to wake up to and a huge win for free speech.” Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., in keeping with her anti-big tech stance, said on X: “Now that President Trump is about to take office, Meta has allegedly decided to stop censoring conservatives. This is a ploy to avoid being regulated. We will not be fooled.”
A representative for Meta pointed NBC News to its hateful conduct policy in regard to where Meta said moderation around immigration, gender and gender identity will be scaled back. On Tuesday, the policy was updated to include the following language: “We do allow allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality and common non-serious usage of words like ‘weird.’”
