(1) Meta to End Fact-Checking on Facebook, Instagram Ahead of Trump Term: Live Updates - The New York Times
►https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/01/07/business/meta-fact-checking#meta-fact-checking-facebook
The social networking giant will stop using third-party fact-checkers on Facebook, Threads and Instagram and instead rely on users to add notes to posts. It is likely to please President-elect Trump and his allies.
ImageThe word Meta and its logo displayed on a white sign.
Since the election, Meta has moved swiftly to try to repair its relationships with conservatives.Credit...Jason Henry for The New York Times
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Zuckerberg conceded there would be more ‘bad stuff’ on his sites. Here’s the latest.
Meta on Tuesday announced changes to its content moderation practices that would effectively end a fact-checking program instituted to curtail the spread of misinformation across its social media apps. Instead of using news organizations and other third-party groups, Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and Threads, will rely on users to add notes to posts that may contain false or misleading information.
The reversal of the years-old policy is a stark sign of how the company is repositioning itself for the Trump presidency in the weeks before it begins. Meta described the changes with the language of a mea culpa: Joel Kaplan, Meta’s newly installed global policy chief, said in a statement that the company wanted to “undo the mission creep that has made our rules too restrictive and too prone to over-enforcement.”
Meta’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, said in a video that the new protocol, which will begin in the United States in the coming months, is similar to the one used by X, called Community Notes.
“It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression,” Mr. Zuckerberg said. The company’s current fact-checking system, he added, had “reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship.”
Here’s what to know:
A trade-off: Mr. Zuckerberg conceded that there would be more “bad stuff” on the platform 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.”
Advance notice: Meta executives recently gave a heads-up to Trump officials about the change in policy, according to a person with knowledge of the conversations who spoke on condition of anonymity. The fact-checking announcement coincided with an appearance by Joel Kaplan, Meta’s newly installed global policy chief, on “Fox & Friends,” a favorite show of President-elect Donald J. Trump. Mr. Kaplan told the hosts of the morning show popular with conservatives that there was “too much political bias” in the fact-checking program.
Currying favor: Ever since Mr. Trump’s victory in November, few big companies have worked as overtly to curry favor with the president-elect. In a series of announcements during the presidential transition period, Meta has sharply shifted its strategy in response to what Mr. Zuckerberg called a “cultural tipping point” marked by the election.
Inspired by X: Mr. Zuckerberg seems to be taking a page from Mr. Trump’s favorite tech mogul, Elon Musk. Mr. Musk has relied on Community Notes to flag misleading posts on X. Since taking over the social network, Mr. Musk, a major Trump donor, has increasingly positioned X as the platform behind the new Trump presidency.
Conservatives cheer: Meta’s move on Tuesday morning elated conservative allies of Mr. Trump, many of whom have disliked Meta’s practice of adding disclaimers or warnings to questionable or false posts. Mr. Trump has long railed against Mr. Zuckerberg, claiming the fact-checking feature treated posts by conservative users unfairly.
Eased restrictions: Among the changes announced on Tuesday are the removal of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender identity that Mr. Zuckerberg said were “out of touch with mainstream discourse.” The company’s trust and safety and content moderation teams will be moved away from California, with the U.S. content review shifting to Texas, in a move that would “help remove the concern that biased employees are overly censoring content,” Mr. Zuckerberg added.
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Mark Zuckerberg’s history of moving Meta toward where the political wind blows.
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Mark Zuckerberg in 2019.Credit...Jessica Chou for The New York Times
In 2016, Mark Zuckerberg announced that he was instituting a fact-checking program across Facebook and Instagram after being accused of disseminating misinformation. Eight years later, Mr. Zuckerberg has done an about-face, ending the program and characterizing it as a gross overcorrection.
It may seem like whiplash. But it is far from the first time that Meta’s chief executive has shifted his stance based on where the political winds are blowing.
In January 2021, Mr. Zuckerberg banned Mr. Trump from posting on Meta’s apps two days after the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol. At the time, Mr. Zuckerberg said the “risks” of allowing Mr. Trump — who had urged his followers to take action after losing to the Democratic challenger, Joseph R. Biden, in the presidential election — to continue posting to Facebook and Instagram were “simply too great.”
Less than four years later, Meta rolled back those restrictions and reinstated Mr. Trump, saying it was important for the American public to hear from both Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump in the run-up to the 2024 election. Meta also said that the restrictions on Mr. Trump’s account in 2016 were a result of “extraordinary circumstances.”
Mr. Zuckerberg has flip-flopped on political content as well. Last year, Meta trotted out its top executives to defend a policy of downplaying speech on political or social issues across its apps. At the time, Mr. Zuckerberg and his allies didn’t want to see such content online, instead opting to have more fun or personal connections on social media.
But on Tuesday, Mr. Zuckerberg announced an abrupt end to that policy as well. He said people actually do want political speech across Meta’s apps, and that censoring some of those topics was “out of touch with mainstream discourse.”
Mr. Zuckerberg maintained that his position was consistent with past beliefs he professed in public, including a speech at Georgetown University in 2019 in which he defended the company’s policy of not wanting his social network to be “an arbiter of speech.”
While Mr. Zuckerberg may believe in that principle, he has shifted the ways Meta’s policy teams have applied it over the course of the Biden and Trump administrations. Under President Biden, Mr. Zuckerberg was more willing to take down certain forms of content specifically around Covid-19, a move he said he later regretted making.
On Tuesday, Mr. Zuckerberg said Meta was looking forward to “going back to its roots” on free speech, and that working with the Trump administration would help them to do that more effectively.
At least until the next president takes office in 2028.
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Meta says fact-checkers were the problem. Fact-checkers rule that false.
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Mark Zuckerberg, dressed in a black T-shirt, at San Francisco’s Chase Center last year.
Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, in San Francisco last year.Credit...Mike Kai Chen for The New York Times
Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, blamed the company’s fact-checking partners for some of Facebook’s moderation issues, saying in a video that “fact-checkers have been too politically biased” and have “destroyed more trust than they created.”
Fact-checking groups that worked with Meta have taken issue with that characterization, saying they had no role in deciding what the company did with the content that was fact-checked.
“I don’t believe we were doing anything, in any form, with bias,” said Neil Brown, the president of the Poynter Institute, a global nonprofit that runs PolitiFact, one of Meta’s fact-checking partners. “There’s a mountain of what could be checked, and we were grabbing what we could.”
Mr. Brown said the group used Meta’s tools to submit fact-checks and followed Meta’s rules that prevented the group from fact-checking politicians. Meta ultimately decided how to respond to the fact-checks, adding warning labels, limiting the reach of some content or even removing the posts.
“We did not, and could not, remove content,” wrote Lori Robertson, the managing editor of FactCheck.org, which has partnered with Meta since 2016, in a blog post. “Any decisions to do that were Meta’s.”
Meta is shifting instead to a program it’s calling Community Notes, which will see it rely on its own users to write fact-checks instead of third-party organizations. Researchers have found the program can be effective when paired with other moderation strategies.
Danielle Kaye
Jan. 7, 2025, 2:09 p.m. ET2 hours ago
Danielle Kaye
Several digital rights groups are condemning Meta’s reversal of its fact-checking program. Nicole Gill, executive director of Accountable Tech, said in a statement that the decision is “a gift to Donald Trump and extremists around the world.” Nora Benavidez, senior counsel at advocacy group Free Press, said in a statement that Zuckerberg is “saying yes to more lies, yes to more harassment, yes to more hate.”
Kate Conger
Jan. 7, 2025, 2:08 p.m. ET2 hours ago
Kate CongerReporting on the X Platform
The Community Notes program from X requires consensus from users with varying perspectives before a fact-check is published. But researchers have found that, as Americans become increasingly polarized, few fact-checks see the light of day. According to Mediawise, a media literacy program at the Poynter Institute, less than 10 percent of Community Notes drafted by X users end up getting published on the platform.
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Meta’s content moderation changes are taking effect amid U.S. regulatory scrutiny.
Lina Khan, chair of the Federal Trade Commission, sits in a chair as she testifies before a House Judiciary Committee hearing in 2023 in Washington.
Lina Khan, the chair of the Federal Trade Commission, in Washington in 2023.Credit...Tom Brenner for The New York TimesMeta is changing the way it moderates content on its site amid heightened U.S. regulatory scrutiny.
The Federal Trade Commission has sued Meta, accusing the company of breaking antitrust laws when it acquired both Instagram and WhatsApp. That trial is slated to start in April. Meta also faces suits by dozens of state attorneys general over child safety and privacy violations.
Republicans have also harshly criticized Meta’s policies on removing content they say amounts to censorship of conservative voices and have held hearings on Capitol Hill grilling Mark Zuckerberg and other executives. And in recent weeks, President-elect Donald J. Trump has selected new leaders of the F.T.C. and Federal Communications Commission who have vowed to crack down on the power of the biggest tech companies and to punish them for stifling speech.
Since Mr. Trump’s election, Mr. Zuckerberg has made several overt attempts to win over the incoming administration, meeting with the president-elect, publicly congratulated his victory and donating $1 million to his inauguration.
But some Republicans shared skeptical reactions to Meta’s decision to delegate fact-checking posts to its users.
“Now that President Trump is about to take office, Meta has allegedly decided to stop censoring conservatives,” Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., posted on X. “This is a ploy to avoid being regulated. We will not be fooled.”
Mr. Trump during a news conference on Tuesday said he was impressed by the decision but conceded that the change was “probably” because of threats he’s made against the company and Zuckerberg.
The F.T.C. didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. Meta declined to comment.
Meta has been caught up in a larger effort by U.S. regulators to crack down on the power of the biggest tech companies in the internet era. The F.T.C. and the Department of Justice have also sued Apple, Google and Amazon over monopolistic practices.
The April trial against Meta will help determine the company’s fate as the world’s biggest social media juggernaut.
The lawsuit was originally filed during the Trump administration, although it’s unclear how much support Andrew Ferguson, Mr. Trump’s pick to lead the F.T.C., might lend to its continuing prosecution. The F.T.C. under Democratic chair Lina Khan, brought a revised version of its lawsuit against Meta in January 2022.
The F.T.C. has said the company’s purchases of Instagram in 2012 for $1 billion and WhatsApp in 2014 for nearly $19 billion were intended to destroy competition and create a social media monopoly. In the suit, the F.T.C. said the company abused its monopoly position through a “buy or bury” acquisition strategy.
Judge James Boasberg of U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia said the case will likely last about eight weeks but could go longer. Mr. Zuckerberg is expected to be among witnesses to appear during the trial.
The F.T.C.’s case against Meta may be harder to win than other cases of tech monopolization, legal experts say. It focuses on acquisitions that are more than a decade old and are hard to review in retrospect for antitrust violations. The F.T.C. also allowed the mergers to proceed when the deals were first announced.
Theodore Schleifer
Jan. 7, 2025, 12:46 p.m. ET3 hours ago
Theodore Schleifer
Trump was asked about Meta’s announcement at an unrelated news conference he was hosting at Mar-a-Lago. Trump said he watched Joel Kaplan’s interview on Fox and found it “impressive,” adding that the company had “come a long way.” A beat later, though, Trump conceded that the change was “probably” due to threats that he has made against the company and its leader, Mark Zuckerberg.
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Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times
Danielle Kaye
Jan. 7, 2025, 12:33 p.m. ET4 hours ago
Danielle Kaye
President-elect Donald J. Trump, reacting to Meta’s fact-checking decision, told Fox News that the company has “come a long way.” And while some Republican lawmakers, including Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, have praised the move, a least one has been skeptical. Senator Marsha Blackburn, a Republican from Tennessee, said in a post on X that Meta’s change was “a ploy to avoid being regulated.”
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David McCabe
Jan. 7, 2025, 12:17 p.m. ET4 hours ago
David McCabe
Meta joins tech companies flocking to Texas.
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The skyline of Austin, Texas, in 2022. Meta has had a presence in the city for years and also has a data center in Fort Worth, Texas.Credit...Miranda Barnes for The New York Times
Meta is joining Elon Musk’s X in moving some operations to Texas.
Going forward, the social media company will run its U.S. content review operations out of the Lone Star State, its chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, said on Tuesday. He also said that Meta will move its teams that focus on trust and safety and content moderation out of California, where the company is based.
The move “will help us build trust to do this work in places where there’s less concern about the bias of our teams,” Mr. Zuckerberg said.
The move echoes Elon Musk’s decision last year to move the headquarters of X, his social media platform, from California to Texas and close its main San Francisco office. At the time, Mr. Musk blamed a California law that barred school districts from requiring teachers to notify parents if their children change their gender identification.
Meta, which is headquartered in Silicon Valley’s Menlo Park, has faced years of criticism from Republicans over a perceived liberal work force and claims of censoring conservative voices. Picks to lead major regulatory agencies in the new Trump administration have vowed to go after social media companies.
Meta has had a presence for years in Austin, Texas, one of the more liberal cities in the state. The company also has a data center in Fort Worth, Texas. A Meta spokesman, Andy Stone, declined to provide details on how many roles the company planned to move out of California.
Texas has in recent years positioned itself as a hub for the tech industry. Still, state lawmakers in 2021 passed a law that barred social media companies like Meta from taking down political viewpoints. The law has been challenged by tech industry groups.
The Supreme Court returned the issue to a lower court last year.
Kate Conger
Jan. 7, 2025, 11:52 a.m. ET4 hours ago
Kate CongerReporting on the X Platform
Joel Kaplan, Meta’s new chief global affairs officer, credited Elon Musk’s influence during an interview this morning on Fox & Friends. “I think Elon’s played an incredibly important role in moving the debate and getting people refocused on free expression,” Kaplan said.
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Stuart A. Thompson
Jan. 7, 2025, 11:14 a.m. ET5 hours ago
Stuart A. Thompson
Meta ends interventions widely seen as effective at reducing belief in falsehoods.
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The blue Meta logo on a white sign in front of Facebook’s corporate headquarters in California.
Meta’s headquarters in Menlo Park, Ca., in 2021.Credit...Jim Wilson/The New York Times
Multiple studies have shown that interventions like Facebook’s fact-checks were effective at reducing belief in falsehoods and reducing how often such content is shared.
A study published last year in the journal Nature Human Behavior showed that warning labels, like those used by Facebook to caution users about false information, reduced belief in falsehoods by 28 percent and reduced how often the content was shared by 25 percent. Researchers found that right-wing users were far more distrustful of fact-checks, but that the interventions were still effective at reducing their belief in false content.
“These results suggest that fact-checker warning labels are a broadly effective tool for combating misinformation,” the study concluded.
Meta intends to shift to Community Notes, a program pioneered at X that relies on users to publish fact-checks instead of relying on third-party fact-checkers. On X, the fact-checks are not widely visible until they are approved by a mix of users from different political backgrounds — a process that can take hours or days. Many falsehoods spread widely on the platform before the fact-check is published for all users to see, ultimately minimizing the effect they can have, researchers have found.
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Cecilia Kang
Jan. 7, 2025, 11:04 a.m. ET5 hours ago
Cecilia Kang
Joel Kaplan, Meta’s new chief global affairs officer, delivered a stinging rebuke of the Biden administration on Fox and Friends today, saying, “When you have a U.S. president, administration, that is pushing for censorship, it just makes it open season for other governments around the world that don’t even have the protections of the First Amendment to really put pressure on U.S. companies.”
Nico Grant
Jan. 7, 2025, 10:55 a.m. ET5 hours ago
Nico Grant
YouTube has long tried to balance its commitment to free-speech ideals with its interest in offering a platform that feels safe for advertisers. It currently places information panels on some videos that contain misinformation, including falsehoods about Covid-19.
Nico Grant
Jan. 7, 2025, 10:54 a.m. ET5 hours ago
Nico Grant
It wouldn’t be surprising if YouTube followed Meta in letting go of fact-checking. The platform has a reputation for loosening its content moderation rules after rivals do, like when it stopped removing 2020 election misinformation after X and Meta.
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Theodore Schleifer
Jan. 7, 2025, 10:39 a.m. ET6 hours ago
Theodore Schleifer
A detail in our story that is worth noting — Trump’s team had a heads-up this was coming. Meta executives recently gave a heads-up to Trump officials about the change in policy, according to a person with knowledge of the conversations.
Nico Grant
Jan. 7, 2025, 10:34 a.m. ET6 hours ago
Nico Grant
YouTube has also begun experimenting with community notes. Last June, the company started a pilot program to allow a group of users to place community notes on videos, adding more context and information. The platform is still relying on third-party evaluators, however, to judge whether the notes are helpful.
Nico Grant
Jan. 7, 2025, 10:30 a.m. ET6 hours ago
Nico Grant
YouTube has also moved to limit its moderation of political speech. Ahead of the 2024 presidential election, the platform said it would no longer remove content that claimed the 2020 presidential contest and past elections were stolen — a reversal from an earlier policy.
Mike Isaac
Jan. 7, 2025, 10:23 a.m. ET6 hours ago
Mike Isaac
We reported in December that Meta donated $1 million to President-elect Donald J. Trump’s inaugural fund. It was the latest move by Mark Zuckerberg to foster a positive rapport with the incoming president. Read more about the donation here.
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Cecilia Kang
Adam Satariano
Jan. 7, 2025, 10:14 a.m. ETJan. 7, 2025
Cecilia Kang and Adam Satariano
Social media companies are facing a global tug of war over free speech.
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President-elect Donald Trump in a red “Make America Great Again” hat.
President-elect Donald J. Trump and Brendan Carr, his choice to head the Federal Communications Commission, at a SpaceX Starship launch in Boca Chica, Texas, in November.Credit...Pool photo by Brandon Bell
President-elect Donald J. Trump and his allies have vowed to squash an online “censorship cartel” of social media firms that they say targets conservatives.
Already, the president-elect’s newly chosen regulators at the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Trade Commission have outlined plans to stop social media platforms like Facebook and YouTube from removing content the companies deem offensive — and punish advertisers that leave less restrictive platforms like X in protest of the lack of moderation.
“The censorship and advertising boycott cartel must end now!” Elon Musk, the owner of X, whom Mr. Trump has appointed to cut the federal budget, posted on his site last month.
Social Media Companies Face Global Tug-of-War Over Free Speech
In Europe, social media companies face the opposite problem. There, regulators accuse the platforms of being too lax about the information they host, including allowing posts that stoked political violence in Britain and spread hate in Germany and France.
Mr. Trump’s return to the White House is expected to widen the speech divide that has long existed between the United States and Europe, setting up parallel regulatory systems that tech policy experts say could influence elections, public health and public discourse. That’s putting social media companies in the middle of a global tug of war over how to police content on their sites.
“What you are seeing is conflicting laws emerging from the world’s democracies, and consumers in the end suffer,” said Kate Klonick, an associate professor of property and internet law at St. John’s University School of Law. The result could be a fractured internet experience where people see different content based on the laws where they live, she said.
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