Meta to ditch fact checkers

Zuckerberg admits “we’re going to catch less bad stuff”

Facebook, Instagram and Threads founder announces that fact checkers have been too biased and that users will now have responsibility for moderating his platforms.

In a video message yesterday, Mark Zuckerberg set out plans to “dramatically reduce the amount of censorship” on his platforms, and to recommend more political content to users.

Zuckerberg said that Meta’s “factcheckers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created”. Subsequently, he vowed to “get rid of factcheckers and replace them with community notes similar to X”.

X relies on its users to correct misinformation or add context to contentious posts after having removed content moderation as a function from the business.

Zuckerberg also announced that remaining content moderation teams will be moved from California to Texas “where there is less concern about the bias of our teams”, he said. He also admitted that the policy change would mean that “we’re going to catch less bad stuff”.

There will also be a change of policy on controversial topics such as gender and immigration because, according to Zuckerberg, existing policies are “out of touch with mainstream discourse”. He also announced his intention to “work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world that are going after American companies and pushing to censor more”.

Zuckerberg said that the result of the US Presidential election felt like “a cultural tipping point towards, once again, prioritising speech”.

Facebook remains the world’s most popular social media platform by some margin. The site has over 3 billion active users. YouTube is next with approximately 2.5 billion, followed by Meta owned Instagram with approximately 2 billion users. For perspective, X has around 600 million users globally. The policy changes that Zuckerberg announced are going to have a much wider impact than anything Elon Musk has done at X.

The announcement comes days after Nick Clegg, the former UK deputy prime minister, announced he was stepping down as Meta’s President of Global Affairs to be replaced by the prominent Republican Joel Kaplan. Kaplan appeared on Fox and Friends a few minutes after Zuckerberg’s video was posted. Throughout a 15-minute appearance, Kaplan emphasised the keenness of Meta to work with the incoming Trump administration.

“I think there is a real opportunity to work with the new administration both on free expression but also on American leadership in technology and innovation,” he said.

Kaplan’s comments align with one made by Zuckerberg in his video. He cited Europe as a place with “an ever-increasing number of laws institutionalising censorship and making it difficult to build anything innovative”.