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Mike Isaac
Theodore Schleifer
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Jan. 7, 2025, 4:02 p.m. ET16 minutes ago
Mike Isaac and Theodore Schleifer
Mike Isaac has covered Facebook and social media since 2010. Theodore Schleifer covers politics and Silicon Valley.
Meta to End Fact-Checking Program in Shift Ahead of Trump Term
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Mark Zuckerberg standing at a lectern behind a microphone.
Since the election, Mark Zuckerberg and other Meta executives have moved swiftly to try to repair their strained relationships with conservatives.Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times
Meta said on Tuesday that it was ending its longstanding fact-checking program, a policy instituted to curtail the spread of misinformation across its social media apps, in a stark sign of how the company was repositioning itself for the Trump presidency and throwing its weight behind unfettered speech online.
Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, said it would now allow more speech, rely on its users to correct inaccurate and false posts, and take a more personalized approach to political content. It described the changes with the language of regret, saying it had strayed too far from its values over the previous decade.
“It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression,” Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, said in a video announcing the changes. The company’s fact-checking system, he added, had “reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship.”
Mr. Zuckerberg conceded there would be more “bad stuff” on the platforms as a result of the decision. “The reality is that this is a trade-off,” he said. “It means that we’re going to catch less bad stuff, but we’ll also reduce the number of innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally take down.”
Ever since Donald J. Trump’s victory in November, few big companies have worked as overtly to curry favor with the president-elect, who, during his first administration, accused social media platforms of censoring conservative voices. In a series of announcements during this presidential transition period, Meta has sharply shifted its strategy in response to what Mr. Zuckerberg called a “cultural tipping point” marked by the election.
Mr. Zuckerberg dined with Mr. Trump at Mar-a-Lago in November and Meta later donated $1 million to support Mr. Trump’s inauguration. Last week, Mr. Zuckerberg elevated Joel Kaplan, the highest-ranking Meta executive closest to the Republican Party, to the company’s most senior policy role. And on Monday, Mr. Zuckerberg said Dana White, the head of the Ultimate Fighting Championship and an ally of Mr. Trump’s, would join Meta’s board.
Meta executives recently gave a heads-up to Trump officials about the change in policy, said a person with knowledge of the conversations who spoke on condition of anonymity. The fact-checking announcement coincided with an appearance by Mr. Kaplan on “Fox & Friends,” a favorite show of Mr. Trump’s, where Mr. Kaplan said there was “too much political bias” in Meta’s fact-checking program.
Mr. Trump said that he had watched Mr. Kaplan’s Fox interview and found it “impressive” and that Meta had “come a long way.” Mr. Trump also said Meta’s change was “probably” a result of the threats he had made against the company and Mr. Zuckerberg.
The influence of Elon Musk, the world’s richest man who leads X, SpaceX and Tesla, also loomed large over Meta’s shift. Since buying X in 2022, Mr. Musk has thrown out the platform’s restrictions on online speech and has turned to a program called Community Notes, which depends on X’s users to police false and misleading content. Mr. Musk, who has become a key adviser to Mr. Trump, also moved X to Texas and out of California, where it had been based, and has criticized California’s policies.
On Tuesday, Meta said it would also turn to a Community Notes program after seeing “this approach work on X.” In addition, Mr. Zuckerberg said his company would run its U.S. trust and safety and content moderation operations from Texas instead of California “to do this work in places where there’s less concern about the bias of our teams.”
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The Meta headquarters in Menlo Park.Credit...Jason Henry for The New York Times
In his Fox appearance on Tuesday, Mr. Kaplan pushed back against the idea that anyone was influencing Mr. Zuckerberg’s decisions.
“There’s no question that the things that happen at Meta are coming from Mark,” Mr. Kaplan said. But, he added, “I think Elon’s played an incredibly important role in moving the debate and getting people refocused on free expression.”
Misinformation researchers said Meta’s decision to end fact-checking was deeply concerning. Nicole Gill, a founder and the executive director of the digital watchdog organization Accountable Tech, said Mr. Zuckerberg was “reopening the floodgates to the exact same surge of hate, disinformation and conspiracy theories that caused Jan. 6 — and that continue to spur real-world violence.”
In 2021, Facebook shut down Mr. Trump’s account after the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol for inciting violence, before later reinstating him. Multiple studies have since shown that interventions like Facebook’s fact-checks were effective at reducing belief in falsehoods and reducing how often such content was shared.
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In 2021, Facebook shut down Mr. Trump’s account after the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol for inciting violence, before later reinstating him.Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times
But Meta’s move elated conservative allies of Mr. Trump, many of whom have disliked Meta’s practice of adding disclaimers or warnings to questionable or false posts. Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, said in a post on X that Meta “finally admits to censoring speech” and called the change “a huge win for free speech.”
Other Republicans were skeptical. Senator Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee, said in a post on X that Meta’s change was “a ploy to avoid being regulated.”
Meta’s fact-checking policy was born out of Mr. Trump’s previous election win, in 2016. At the time, Facebook came under fire for the unchecked dissemination of misinformation across its network, including posts from foreign governments angling to sow discord among the American public.
After enormous public pressure, Mr. Zuckerberg turned to outside organizations like The Associated Press, ABC News and the fact-checking site Snopes, along with other global organizations vetted by the International Fact-Checking Network, to comb over potentially false or misleading posts on Facebook and Instagram and rule whether they needed to be annotated or removed.
The company spent the next eight years investing billions of dollars, thousands of people and devoting enormous technological resources to fixing content moderation issues. Mr. Zuckerberg tapped more than a dozen outside firms to help police posts, including an army of contractors from firms like Accenture to do much of the manual work of reviewing posts.
Mr. Zuckerberg also stressed the importance of artificial intelligence in handling many of these issues, given that nearly half the people on earth regularly post to one or more of Meta’s apps.
But over time, Mr. Zuckerberg grew frustrated with the lack of credit the company was given for trying to tamp down misinformation, two people close to the chief executive said. He felt that the time and effort Meta had put into the initiative was seeing diminishing returns, they said.
Mr. Zuckerberg expressed that frustration in a speech at Georgetown University in 2019, in which he said he did not want his social network to be “an arbiter of speech.” He said that Facebook had been founded to give people a voice, and that critics who assailed the company for doing so were setting a dangerous example.
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Mark Zuckerberg at Georgetown University in 2019 when he said that he did not want Facebook to be an “arbiter of free speech.”Credit...Justin T. Gellerson for The New York Times
Mr. Zuckerberg also regretted the pressure that the Biden administration put on him to take down content related to Covid-19, a sentiment he relayed publicly in a letter to Congress last year. In the letter, Mr. Zuckerberg said the administration overreached in requests to take down content, “including humor and satire.” In hindsight, Meta should have pushed back more on the White House’s requests, he said.
By 2022, Meta had begun winnowing some of its content moderation and policy teams as part of widespread corporate cost cutting. The company continues to make strategic cuts on a rolling basis.
Among the changes announced on Tuesday were the removal of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender identity that Mr. Zuckerberg said were “out of touch with mainstream discourse.” Meta said it would begin phasing in more personalized political content, based on the signals people gave about what they were interested in seeing in their feeds.
Mr. Zuckerberg has evolved personally, too. In recent years, he has grown closer to Mr. White of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, and has immersed himself in the right-leaning environment of professional fighting. He has become tired of the constant attacks on him and his company and found dealing with Mr. Biden’s proactive approach to reining in the tech industry frustrating, two people familiar with his thinking said.
Above all else, the incoming Trump administration and its focus on free speech allows Meta to finally free itself from the Sisyphean task of monitoring the billions of posts that flow through its apps.
“We have a new administration coming in that is far from pressuring companies to censor and a huge supporter of free expression,” Mr. Kaplan said on Fox. “It gets us back to the values that Mark founded the company on.”
Kate Conger and Stuart A. Thompson contributed reporting.
Mark Zuckerberg’s Shift
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Sheera Frenkel
Mike Isaac
Jan. 7, 2025, 4:10 p.m. ET8 minutes ago
Sheera Frenkel and Mike Isaac
Reporting from San Francisco
Mark Zuckerberg’s Political Evolution, From Apologies to No More Apologies
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Mark Zuckerberg sits at a desk with an audience behind him and a crowd of photographers training their lenses on him in front of him.
Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook, at a Senate hearing in 2018.Credit...Tom Brenner/The New York Times
In November 2016, as Facebook was being blamed for a torrent of fake news and conspiracy theories swirling around the first election of Donald J. Trump, Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of the social network, wrote an apologetic post.
In his message, Mr. Zuckerberg announced a series of steps he planned to take to grapple with false and misleading information on Facebook, such as working with fact checkers.
“The bottom line is: we take misinformation seriously,” he wrote in a personal Facebook post. “There are many respected fact checking organizations,” he added, “and, while we have reached out to some, we plan to learn from many more.”
Eight years later, Mr. Zuckerberg is no longer apologizing. On Tuesday, he announced that Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Threads, was ending its fact-checking program and getting back to its roots around free expression. The fact-checking system had led to “too much censorship,” he said.
It was the latest step in a transformation of Mr. Zuckerberg. In recent years, the chief executive, now 40, has stepped away from his mea culpa approach to problems on his social platforms. Fed up with what has seemed at times to be unceasing criticism of his company, he has told executives close to him that he wants to return to his original thinking on free speech, which involves a lighter hand in content moderation.
Mr. Zuckerberg has remolded Meta as he has made the shift. Gone is the CrowdTangle transparency tool, which allowed researchers, academics and journalists to monitor conspiracy theories and misinformation on Facebook. The company’s election integrity team, once trumpeted as a group of experts focused solely on issues around the vote, has been folded into a general integrity team.
Instead, Mr. Zuckerberg has promoted technology efforts at Meta, including its investments in the immersive world of the so-called metaverse and its focus on artificial intelligence.
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Leafy trees reflected in the glass wall of a store displaying a Meta sign.
The Meta Store in Burlingame, Calif. Mr. Zuckerberg has been promoting the company’s investments in the technology of the metaverse and artificial intelligence.Credit...Jason Henry for The New York Times
Mr. Zuckerberg’s change has been visible on his social media. Photos of him uncomfortably clad in a suit and tie and testifying before Congress have been replaced by videos of him with longer hair and in gold chains, competing in extreme sports and sometimes hunting for his own food. Long, heavily lawyered Facebook posts about Meta’s commitment to democracy no longer appear. Instead, he has posted quips on Threads responding to celebrity athletes and videos showing the company’s newest A.I. initiatives.
“This shows how Mark Zuckerberg is feeling that society is more accepting of those libertarian and right-leaning viewpoints that he’s always had,” said Katie Harbath, chief executive of Anchor Change, a tech consulting firm, who previously worked at Facebook. “This is an evolved return to his political origins.”
Mr. Zuckerberg has long been a pragmatist who has gone where the political winds have blown. He has flip-flopped on how much political content should be shown to Facebook and Instagram users, previously saying social networks should be about fun, relatable content from family and friends but then on Tuesday saying Meta would show more personalized political content.
Mr. Zuckerberg has told executives close to him that he is comfortable with the new direction of his company. He sees his most recent steps as a return to his original thinking on free speech and free expression, with Meta limiting its monitoring and controlling of content, said two Meta executives who spoke with Mr. Zuckerberg in the last week.
Mr. Zuckerberg was never comfortable with the involvement of outside fact checkers, academics or researchers in his company, one of the executives said. He now sees many of the steps taken after the 2016 election as a mistake, the two executives said.
“Fact checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created,” Mr. Zuckerberg said in a video on Tuesday about the end of the fact-checking program, echoing statements made by top Republicans over the years.
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Rows and rows of cardboard cutouts of Mr. Zuckerberg standing outside the U.S. Capitol. The cutouts include a T-shirt that says, “Fix Facebook.”
An advocacy group displayed cardboard cutouts of Mr. Zuckerberg outside the U.S. Capitol in 2018.Credit...Gabriella Demczuk for The New York Times
Meta declined to comment.
Those who have known Mr. Zuckerberg for decades describe him as a natural libertarian, who enjoyed reading books extolling free expression and the free market system after he dropped out of Harvard to start Facebook in 2004. As his company grew, so did pressure to become more responsive to complaints from world leaders and civil society groups that he was not doing enough to moderate content on his platform.
Crises including a genocide in Myanmar, in which Facebook was blamed for allowing hate speech to spread against the Muslim Rohingya people, forced Mr. Zuckerberg to expand moderation teams and define rules around speech on his social networks.
He was coached by people close to him, including Meta’s former chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, to become more involved in politics. After the 2016 election, Mr. Zuckerberg embarked on a public campaign to clear his name and redeem his company. He held regular meetings with civic leaders and invited politicians to visit his company’s headquarters, rolled out transparency tools such as CrowdTangle and brought on fact checkers.
In 2017, he announced that he was conducting a “listening tour” across the United States to “get a broader perspective” on how Americans used Facebook. The campaign-like photo opportunities with farmers and autoworkers led to speculation that he was running for political office.
Despite his efforts, Mr. Zuckerberg continued to be blamed for the misinformation and falsehoods that spread on Facebook and Instagram.
In October 2019, Mr. Zuckerberg began to push back. In an address at Georgetown University, he said Facebook had been founded to give people a voice.
“I’m here today because I believe we must continue to stand for free expression,” he said.
In 2021, when the Jan. 6 riot broke out at the U.S. Capitol after the presidential election, Meta was again held responsible for hosting speech that fomented the violence. Two weeks later, Mr. Zuckerberg told investors that the company was “considering steps” to reduce political content across Facebook.
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A six-lane highway curving past a long, low office building and a row of four transmission towers.
The headquarters of Meta, which Mr. Zuckerberg recently said could need a decade to get its brand back to where he wanted it. Credit...Jason Henry for The New York Times
His evolution since then has been steady. Executives who pushed Mr. Zuckerberg to involve himself directly in politics, including Ms. Sandberg, have left the company. Those closest to him now cheer his focus on his own interests, which include extreme sports and rapping for his wife, as well as promoting his company’s A.I. initiatives.
In a podcast interview in San Francisco that Mr. Zuckerberg recorded live in front of an audience of 6,000 in September, he spoke for nearly 90 minutes about his love of technology. He said he should have rejected accusations that his company was responsible for societal ills.
“I think that the political miscalculation was a 20-year mistake,” he said. He added that it could take another decade for him to move his company’s brand back to where he wanted it.
“We’ll get through it, and we’ll come out stronger,” Mr. Zuckerberg said.
