On January 7, Mark Zuckebrerg made a not-so-stunning announcement.
The Meta CEO said that his company is ending its third-party fact-checking program, declaring that “experts, like everyone else, have their own biases and perspectives.” Instead, it’ll allow “more speech” and rely on a user-generated community notes feature like Elon Musk’s X already does.
This is a culmination of a yearslong rightward lurch away from the social media giant. Right-wing media has always thrived on Facebook, while left-wing critics have long criticized the company for everything from enabling genocide to allowing hate speech to thrive. But Republicans in Congress and on the campaign trail have scolded Meta for kicking Donald Trump off its platform in the wake of the January 6, 2021, insurrection and for heavily monitoring misinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic.
But in recent years the company has taken exaggerated strides to demonstrate that they’re no lefties. Meta allowed Trump to rejoin its platforms in 2023, announced it was deprioritizing political content across Instagram and Threads, and this week made former Bush White House official Joel Kaplan its global affairs chief. Oh, and Meta gave $1 million to Trump’s inauguration committee.
“This is a great opportunity for us to reset the balance in favor of free expression,” Kaplan told Fox News in an interview. “What we’re doing is we’re getting back to our roots and free expression.”
With Trump assuming the presidency on January 20, Meta knows it needs to play nice with the administration. Trump previously claimed that Zuckerberg plotted against him during the 2020 election and wrote that he would “spend the rest of his life in prison” if he tried it again.
But the move to end Meta’s fact-checking program is just as much a reflection of the current state of its main platform, Facebook, than a political offering to the party in power. I mean, have you seen Facebook lately?
