Meta cites political bias in move to suspend fact-checking on Facebook, Instagram

SALT LAKE CITY — Reversing a policy enacted following the 2016 presidential election, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced plans to cancel third-party fact-checking on its social media platforms and dial back automated filters in an effort to "get back to our roots around free expression on Facebook and Instagram."

In a video posted Tuesday, Zuckerberg outlined the motivations behind the policy changes, including citing outcomes of the recently completed 2024 election cycle as "a cultural tipping point toward once again prioritizing speech."

"After (President-elect Donald) Trump first got elected in 2016 the legacy media wrote nonstop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy," Zuckerberg said. "And we tried in good faith to address those concerns without becoming the arbiters of truth. But the fact checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they created, especially in the U.S."

Let users monitor content

Zuckerberg said third-party fact-checking will be replaced with a "Community Notes" program, similar to a system adopted by X under Elon Musk's ownership, that relies on crowdsourced, user-generated notices on false or misleading content.

"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," Meta wrote in a posting that accompanied Tuesday's video release. "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."

Zuckerberg said the automated systems Meta has built to identify and remove objectionable postings have become over-complicated and led to errors and the censoring of "harmless" content.

"What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions, shut out people with different ideas and it's gone too far," Zuckerberg said. "So, I want to make sure people can share their beliefs and experiences on our platform."

Meta allowing controversial topics again

In its explanation of policy changes, Meta also indicated it was removing a number of previous restrictions, including on topics like immigration, gender identity and gender that "are the subject of frequent political discourse and debate." In addition, the social media giant noted it's reversing course on a 2021 policy change that aimed to reduce posts about elections, politics or social issues, which it said was based, at the time, on "feedback our users gave us that they wanted to see less of this content."

"But this was a pretty blunt approach," Meta wrote in its Tuesday posting. "We are going to start phasing this back into Facebook, Instagram and Threads with a more personalized approach so that people who want to see more political content in their feeds can."

A report from The Wall Street Journal notes Meta's policy pivot comes as Zuckerberg works to build stronger ties with Trump and his incoming administration alongside other efforts, including Meta's $1 million donation to Trump's inaugural fund.

Last week, Meta announced Joel Kaplan, a former aide to President George W. Bush, was taking over as the company's head of global policy, a move that should further enhance Meta's Republican ties.

Trump decision reversed

In 2021, Facebook's Oversight Board booted Trump off Facebook and Instagram over his posts about the U.S. Capitol insurrection that occurred on Jan. 6 that year.

"The board found that, in maintaining an unfounded narrative of electoral fraud and persistent calls to action, Mr. Trump created an environment where a serious risk of violence was possible," the board posted in May of 2021. "At the time of Mr. Trump's posts, there was a clear, immediate risk of harm and his words of support for those involved in the riots legitimized their violent actions."

Meta officials reversed their decision in early 2023 and allowed Trump back on its platforms.

Utah Republican Sen. Mike Lee has been among the vocal critics of perceived censorship of conservative viewpoints by social media platform operators and accused Facebook of inappropriately tagging one of his posts amid the political turbulence following the outcome of the 2020 U.S. presidential election.

During a congressional hearing held shortly after the 2020 election, Lee said he found it "a little disturbing" that Facebook tagged one of his posts about the presidential race with "voter fraud, which is historically rare, has not affected any outcome in this election" and that mail-in balloting was "conducted in accordance with state voting rules."

"The tag to me sounds a whole lot more like state-run media announcing the party line rather than a neutral company, as it purports to be, running an open online forum," Lee said. "This kind of editorializing insulates people from the truth and it insinuates that anyone concerned about voter fraud must be crazy."

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