Facebook to lose fact-checkers: ‘Zuckerberg’s been pushed by the political winds’

Read time: 3-4 minutes

In brief:

• Mark Zuckerberg has announced removal of fact-checkers on Meta platforms in the US, replacing them with "community notes" similar to X.
• Changes appear directly influenced by Trump's election victory and reported threats to Zuckerberg.
• The News Agents say this major policy shift is driven by political pressure rather than a genuine belief in the principles.

What’s the story?

Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Meta - the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and Threads - has announced significant changes to its platforms in the name of free speech.

“It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression,” the 40-year-old tech tycoon said in a video message on Fox & Friends. The choice of platform to make the announcement on itself a sign of what’s to come.

Most notably, Zuckerberg announced the removal of independent fact-checkers, saying that third-party moderators were "too politically biased.”

The company introduced fact-checking in 2016 - the year Trump first became president, after facing pressure around Facebook’s role in the spreading of misinformation during the election campaign.

“We tried in good faith to address those concerns without becoming arbiters of the truth”, he said in the video.

In place of fact-checkers, Zuckerberg said he will introduce “community notes”, likening the new plan directly to what Elon Musk has introduced on X since his purchase of the platform.

“If you don't like what Elon Musk has done to Twitter, well, buckle up, because these other big sites, Instagram, Facebook, are going to look a lot more like Musk's vision of the internet,” Lewis Goodall says.

The changes will be “in the US first”, with “no immediate plans” to get rid of fact-checkers in the UK or EU, likely because of tighter regulations.

Specific policy changes Mark Zuckerberg made in the announcement include:

• Eliminating fact-checkers in the US and replacing them with a "community notes" system similar to X (formerly Twitter)
• "Simplifying" content policies by removing certain restrictions on topics like immigration and gender
• Removing filters that scan for all policy violations to reduce the “amount of censorship” on Meta
• Bring back “civic content”, after previously reducing the number of posts with political content served to users
• Move Trust and Safety and Content Moderations teams from California to Texas to help “build trust in places where there’s less concern about bias of teams”
• “Work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world that are going after American companies and pushing to censor more”

Zuckerberg has described the policy changes as a “trade-off”, acknowledging that it means more misinformation and dangerous content will flood the platforms.

“It means we’re gonna catch less bad stuff, but it’ll also reduce the number of innocent peoples posts that we accidentally take down.”

Why are these changes happening?

With just weeks to go until the inauguration, there’s no denying that president-elect Donald Trump has a strong hand to play in the significant changes about to take place.

Zuckerberg directly references Trump in the video, saying that “the recent elections feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritising speech.”

But the American electorate’s decision to vote Trump back in alone doesn't account for Meta’s 180 decision.

In a press conference after the changes were announced, Trump, who met with Zuckerberg in Mar-a-Lago in November, was asked if Zuckerberg was “directly responding” to threats Trump had made to him in the past.

Trump’s reply?

“Probably.”

“Clearly Zuckerberg has heard the threats from Trump, one of those threats suggested that he'd end up in jail, and he has decided that it is better to go along with what Trump wants after his election victory,” Emily Maitlis says.

“Trump doesn't mind being a bully. He's already threatened Zuckerberg with prison. And actually, for all this talk of freedom of speech, Zuckerberg clearly doesn't have any when it comes to deciding what he wants to do with his own platform.”

The News Agents’ Take

Lewis calls the announcement “one of the biggest shifts in the editorial policy of one of the biggest online companies in the world, that almost certainly would not have taken place if Kamala Harris had won the presidency”.

This, he says, is worth “anyone who says elections don't matter,” bearing in mind.

One of the big questions is whether Zuckerberg has always, deep down, wanted to prioritise free speech over regulation, or whether his mind has simply changed since the fact-checking regulations he introduced in 2016.

“There is no doubt that what Zuckerberg is doing here is not out of any great conversion to these ideals,” Lewis says.

“It's about the fact that Trump is there. He's seen Elon Musk become one of Trump's key courtiers, and he's afraid of getting left behind.”

Emily agrees that Zuckerberg hasn’t had a sudden change of heart.

“This was not a Damascene conversion that happened overnight,” she says, “but this is a guy who has been pushed by the political winds, actually, for the last eight years”.

The move to introduce fact-checkers in 2016 and, as Zuckerberg said at the time, take misinformation seriously, was because that was “where the political pressure was coming from”.

“At the time, he was hauled before Congress, he was told that they had to do better. They had to get their fact checks made more rigorous, and now he's just responding to the new political climate.”

In terms of what this means for the UK, there will be no changes - yet. But there is no doubt that the implications will be felt worldwide, even if they aren’t enforced at home.

“Do we feel superior because we've got something that is regulated, or as they would say, censored?” Emily asks.

“Because we might have our own truths coming at us. But if, actually, the rest of the world is being flooded with non fact based bullshit, why are we the winners?”

Listen to the latest episode of The News Agents.