Meta to end fact-checking program on Facebook and InstagramExBulletin

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified at the US Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in January 2024. Zuckerberg announced on January 7, 2025 that the company would no longer work with third-party fact-checking organizations. Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images .

switch captionBrendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Tuesday that the social media company, which owns Facebook and Instagram, would stop working with third-party fact-checking organizations.

Echoing arguments long used by President-elect Donald Trump and his allies, Zuckerberg said in a video that the company's approach to content moderation too often results in “censorship.”

“After Trump's election in 2016, mainstream media wrote nonstop about how misinformation posed a threat to democracy. We tried in good faith to address these concerns without becoming the arbiters of truth,” Zuckerberg said. “But the fact-checkers have simply been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they have created, particularly in the United States”

Meta established one of the most extensive partnerships with fact-checkers after the 2016 presidential election, in which Russia spread false claims on Facebook and other online platforms. The company created what has become a standard for how technology platforms limit the spread of lies and misleading information.

But the 2020 election and the COVID pandemic have accelerated the backlash from conservatives, who portray content moderation as a form of censorship. Facebook, along with Twitter and YouTube, banned Trump from their platforms after the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, but ultimately allowed him to return before his second run in the election. In recent years, fact checkers, false narrative researchers and content moderation programs on social media have become targets of investigations and legal challenges by the Republican-led Congress.

Zuckerberg said his views on content moderation have changed. Meta made “too many mistakes” in how it enforced its content policies, he said, and pointed to Trump's election to a second term as “a cultural turning point toward a new priority to speech.

“So we will return to our roots, focus on reducing errors, simplify our policies and restore freedom of expression on our platforms,” he said.

Tech companies prepare for Trump 2.0

The move comes as Meta and other tech companies work to smooth over what has been a rocky relationship with Trump. The president-elect and other Republicans have long accused Silicon Valley of harboring anti-conservative bias that has muzzled their online speech. Trump personally accused Zuckerberg of election interference and threatened him with life in prison.

Last week, Meta elevated Joel Kaplan, a former business executive and Republican who worked in George W. Bush's White House, to global policy chief, replacing the former deputy prime minister British Nick Clegg. On Monday, the company named Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO Dana White, a longtime Trump supporter, to its board of directors.

Zuckerberg is among the tech titans who have traveled to Mar-a-Lago to meet with Trump since the election, and Meta donated $1 million to Trump's inauguration fund (Amazon and the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, have made similar promises).

Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth College and longtime Meta watcher, said it was painful to see business leaders “demonstrate performative loyalty” to the new administration.

“Meta clearly perceives a great political risk in being targeted,” Nyhan said in an interview. “And the way Zuckerberg presented the ads, and the timing, was obviously intended to appeal to a Republican audience.”

Some observers say Meta may be hoping for a lighter touch from Trump administration regulators.

Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan speaking at an event in 2024. The FTC, along with most states and territories, has filed a broad antitrust suit against Meta. Eugene Gologursky/Getty Images .

switch caption Eugene Gologursky/Getty Images

Lina Khan, chairwoman of the Federal Trade Commission, said in an interview with CNBC on Tuesday that she was concerned that Meta executives were looking for a “sweetheart deal” in the Trump White House.

A sweeping antitrust case against Meta brought by the FTC and attorneys general of 48 states and territories during Trump's first term is scheduled to go to trial in April. In a recent court filing, government lawyers wrote that Mark Zuckerberg should be among the first witnesses called to the stand.

“Well, look, I can't predict what people in my position will do in the future. It's true that the FTC has had a lot of success, including in its ongoing litigation against Amazon and Facebook,” he said. Khan said. “And so it will be only natural that these companies will want to come and see if they can get some sort of sweetheart deal?”

Republicans hailed Meta's announcement as validation of their long-standing complaints.

“I think they’ve come a long way,” Trump said at a news conference Tuesday. Asked if he thought Zuckerberg was “directly responding to threats you've made to him in the past,” Trump said, “Probably.”

“Meta finally admits to censoring the speech, what a great birthday present to wake up to and a huge victory for free speech,” Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) posted on X.

Research has shown that Republicans are circulating more unfounded claims. One study also found that far-right content was more engaging on Facebook and that far-right sources known for spreading misinformation significantly outperformed non-misinformation sources. Data to definitively prove platform-level bias is not available to researchers.

Meta will follow Elon Musk's advice on fact-checking

Meta said that instead of working with third-party fact-checkers, it would move to a “community notes” program in which users write and rate notes that appear alongside specific posts. It's similar to the approach championed by Elon Musk on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.

“I think Elon has played an extremely important role in moving the debate forward and refocusing people on free speech,” Meta's Kaplan told Fox & Friends on Tuesday.

Meta also said it would change how it enforces its policies, calling systems automated, except for “illegal and high-severity violations,” including terrorism, child sexual exploitation and fraud. The company's U.S. content moderation team will move from California to Texas. The move should “help us build trust to do this work in places where there is less concern about bias among our teams,” Zuckerberg said.

Fact-checkers who have worked with Meta for years pushed back against Zuckerberg's accusation of bias.

“It was particularly troubling to see him echo allegations of bias against fact-checkers, because he knows those who participated in his program were signatories to a code of principles that requires them to be transparent and nonpartisan ” said Bill Adair, co-founder of the International Fact-Checking Network. He founded PolitiFact, an early participant in Facebook's third-party fact-checking program, which he left in 2020.

“Meta, until this morning, has always valued the independence of fact-checkers,” Adair said.

Because Meta pays fact-checkers for their work, some fact-checking organizations, most of which are nonprofits, rely heavily on the company to survive. “We will see fewer fact-checking reports published and fewer fact-checkers operating,” said Angie Drobnic Holan, director of the International Fact Checking Network.

“I think fact-checking programs on social media have been very positive in helping to reduce hoax content and conspiracy theories. And to see it so quickly reduced in this way without a lot of discussion is disappointing,” said Holan.

Meta's funding of fact-checkers has had repercussions beyond its own platforms, said Kate Starbird, a disinformation researcher at the University of Washington who co-founded its Center for an Informed Public. “While built into Facebook's infrastructure, their work has had a much broader impact and has been cited often in other spaces, including X's Community Notes program, which Meta says it will now copy .”

“In short, it will be harder for people to find reliable information online,” she said. Researchers also rely on the work of fact-checkers to better understand what's happening on social media platforms.

Although the effects on some fact-checkers will be immediate, the announcement gives few details about how Meta will change what its users see on their feeds, said Katie Harbath, head of global affairs at the technology consulting firm Duco Experts, which previously worked at Facebook.

But women and LGBTQ communities could be impacted more, she said, given the few specific topics Meta mentioned.

“We will simplify our content policies and remove a number of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender, which are simply disconnected from the dominant discourse.” Zuckerberg said in the video.

“It’s not fair that things can be said on television or in Congress, but not on our platforms,” Kaplan wrote in Meta’s press release about the political news.

“I think these people could be particularly negatively affected [by] that and may have to make the decision to not be on those platforms and not have those audiences to interact with,” Harbath said.

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