Musk surrenders to Trump: ends fact-checking and calls fact checkers politically biased
META boss Mark Zuckerberg announced that he is giving incoming President Donald Trump what Trump has long wanted: an end to fact-checking on Facebook and Instagram. In the process Zuckerberg suggested those who were doing fact checking were politically biased.
That’s the reality –and here is how it was spun:
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a series of major changes to the company’s moderation policies and practices Tuesday, citing a shifting political and social landscape and a desire to embrace free speech.
Zuckerberg said Meta will end its fact-checking program with trusted partners and replace it with a community-driven system similar to X’s Community Notes.
ending its fact-checking program in favor of a ‘community notes’ system similar to X’s
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a series of major changes to the company’s moderation policies and practices, saying the election felt like a “cultural tipping point.
The changes will affect Facebook and Instagram, two of the largest social media platforms in the world, each boasting billions of users, as well as Threads.“We’re going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies and restoring free expression on our platforms,” Zuckerberg said in a video. “More specifically, here’s what we’re going to do. First, we’re going to get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with community notes similar to X, starting in the U.S.”
Zuckerberg pointed to the election as a major influence on the company’s decision and criticized “governments and legacy media” for, he alleged, pushing “to censor more and more.”
“The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards, once again, prioritizing speech,” he said. “So we’re going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies and restoring free expression on our platforms.”
He also said the systems the company had created to moderate its platforms were making too many mistakes, adding that it would continue to aggressively moderate content related to drugs, terrorism and child exploitation.
“We built a lot of complex systems to moderate content, but the problem with complex systems is they make mistakes,” Zuckerberg said. “Even if they accidentally censor just 1% of posts, that’s millions of people, and we’ve reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship.”
Beyond the end of the fact-checking program, Zuckerberg said, the company will eliminate some content policies around immigration, gender and other hot-button issues and refocus its automated moderation systems on what he called “high severity violations,” relying on users to report other violations.
And then there was this:Facebook will also move its trust and safety and content moderation team from California to Texas.
This is just the latest in a string of billionaires and media bigwigs changing their previous policies and/or donating big bucks to his inaugural committee.
Meanwhile, Trump was gloating over Zuckerberg’s decision:
Donald Trump couldn’t help but gloat Tuesday that he’d successfully bullied Mark Zuckerberg into making a spate of policy changes at Meta that will allow for the rampant spread of misinformation.
During a press conference, one reporter asked the president-elect whether he thought he had anything to do with Zuckerberg’s decision to supposedly recommit his social media platforms to free speech by demolishing its fact-checking system, as well as certain content filters and restrictions.
“Do you think he’s directly responding to the threats that you have made to him in the past?” the reporter asked.
“Probably,” Trump replied.
Meta’s new policy changes comes as Trump prepares to return to the White House and make good on the threats he’s been making to Zuckerberg for months.
“We are watching him closely, and if he does anything illegal this time he will spend the rest of his life in prison—as will others who cheat in the 2024 Presidential Election,” Trump wrote in his book Save America, which was published in August.
The president-elect had previously called out his buddy “ZUCKERBUCKS” in a July post on Truth Social, promising to “pursue Election Fraudsters at levels never seen before, and they will be sent to prison for long periods of time.”
Trump’s outrage at the technocrat was in direct response to Zuckerberg’s efforts to curb Covid-19 misinformation, which Trump readily provides. Zuckerberg’s content moderation efforts were rebranded on the right as a kind of censorship, rather than a public health and safety service.
With less than two weeks before Donald Trump takes office, Meta‘s Mark Zuckerberg announced a series of changes to its content moderation practices on Facebook and Instagram, including ending fact-checking and other restrictions.
“The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards, once again, prioritizing speech,” Zuckerberg said in a video posted this morning. “So we’re going back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies and restoring free expression on our platforms.”
The changes are just the latest effort by Meta given that Trump and his allies have targeted the platform and Zuckerberg himself. Following Trump’s reelection, Zuckerberg met with the president-elect. Last week, Meta’s chief global affairs officer, Nick Clegg, announced his departure, to be replaced by Joel Kaplan, a Republican who has been sympathetic to claims that the platform has suppressed conservative voices.
[…]He also unveiled plans to base the U.S. content review teams in Texas, rather than in California, “where there is less concern about the bias in our teams.”
Kaplan and Zuckerberg each held Trump up as a champion of free expression, but did not mention the president-elect’s legacy of attacks on news media, his calls for broadcast networks to lose their licenses for content he disfavors or his numerous lawsuits against legacy outlets.
Trump’s incoming FCC chair, Brendan Carr, has long railed against what he sees as content moderation practices that sideline voices on the right, labeling tech platforms as a “censorship cartel.” He has signaled that the agency would pursue policies that would impose restrictions on how political-oriented content is moderated.
Carr and other Trump allies have also attacked firms that monitor accuracy. That includes NewsGuard, which rates news sites on their reliability. While NewsGuard has given higher scores to outlets like Fox News and The New York Times, one outlet that scored low was Newsmax, which frequently features Trump-friendly lawmakers and allies.
Tech platforms in general have pushed back on the idea that there is systemic censorship of voices on the right, as some of its prominent figures railed against restrictions related to Covid and election integrity. But in his video message, Zuckerberg said that “we built a lot of complex systems to moderate content, but the problem with complex systems, they make mistakes, even if they accidentally censor just 1% of posts, that’s millions of people, and we’ve reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship.”
Connect the dots.
Facebook faces a potentially devastating FTC case slated to begin in April. Trump is now in charge of the FTC.
Zuckerberg makes pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago. Then donates $1M to Trump inauguration. Now this gift to the MAGA anti-democracy forces (and also Putin). https://t.co/xgoMf61Dy7
— Chris Murphy ? (@ChrisMurphyCT) January 8, 2025
A reporter asks about Mark Zuckerberg's Trump-friendly changes at Meta and asks, "Do you think he's directly responding to the threats you've made in the past?" Trump says "probably."
— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) January 7, 2025
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