Meta to End Fact-Checking Program in Shift Ahead of Trump Term

Meta said on Tuesday that it was ending its longstanding fact-checking program, a policy instituted to curtail the spread of misinformation across its social media apps, in a stark sign of how the company was repositioning itself for the Trump presidency and throwing its weight behind unfettered speech online.

Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, said it would now allow more speech, rely on its users to correct inaccurate and false posts, and take a more personalized approach to political content. It described the changes with the language of regret, saying it had strayed too far from its values over the previous decade.

“It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression,” Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, said in a video announcing the changes. The company’s fact-checking system, he added, had “reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship.”

Mr. Zuckerberg conceded there would be more “bad stuff” on the platforms as a result of the decision. “The reality is that this is a trade-off,” he said. “It means that we’re going to catch less bad stuff, but we’ll also reduce the number of innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally take down.”

Ever since Donald J. Trump’s victory in November, few big companies have worked as overtly to curry favor with the president-elect, who, during his first administration, accused social media platforms of censoring conservative voices. In a series of announcements during this presidential transition period, Meta has sharply shifted its strategy in response to what Mr. Zuckerberg called a “cultural tipping point” from the election.

Mr. Zuckerberg dined with Mr. Trump at Mar-a-Lago in November and Meta later donated $1 million to support Mr. Trump’s inauguration. Last week, Mr. Zuckerberg elevated Joel Kaplan, the highest-ranking Meta executive closest to the Republican Party, to the company’s most senior policy role. And on Monday, Mr. Zuckerberg said Dana White, the head of the Ultimate Fighting Championship and an ally of Mr. Trump’s, would join Meta’s board.

Meta executives recently gave a heads-up to Trump officials about the change in policy, said a person with knowledge of the conversations who spoke on condition of anonymity. The fact-checking announcement coincided with an appearance by Mr. Kaplan on “Fox & Friends,” a favorite show of Mr. Trump’s, where Mr. Kaplan said there was “too much political bias” in Meta’s fact-checking program.

Mr. Trump said that he had watched Mr. Kaplan’s Fox interview and found it “impressive” and that Meta had “come a long way.” Mr. Trump also said Meta’s change was “probably” a result of the threats he had made against the company and Mr. Zuckerberg.

The influence of Elon Musk, the world’s richest man who leads X, SpaceX and Tesla, also loomed large over Meta’s shift. Since buying X in 2022, Mr. Musk has thrown out the platform’s restrictions on online speech and has turned to a program called Community Notes, which depends on X’s users to police false and misleading content. Mr. Musk, who has become a key adviser to Mr. Trump, also moved X to Texas and out of California, where it had been based, and has criticized California’s policies.

On Tuesday, Meta said it would also turn to a Community Notes program after seeing “this approach work on X.” In addition, Mr. Zuckerberg said his company would run its U.S. trust and safety and content moderation operations from Texas instead of California “to do this work in places where there’s less concern about the bias of our teams.”

In his Fox appearance on Tuesday, Mr. Kaplan pushed back against the idea that anyone was influencing Mr. Zuckerberg’s decisions.

“There’s no question that the things that happen at Meta are coming from Mark,” Mr. Kaplan said. But, he added, “I think Elon’s played an incredibly important role in moving the debate and getting people refocused on free expression.”

Misinformation researchers said Meta’s decision to end fact-checking was deeply concerning. Nicole Gill, a founder and the executive director of the digital watchdog organization Accountable Tech, said Mr. Zuckerberg was “reopening the floodgates to the exact same surge of hate, disinformation and conspiracy theories that caused Jan. 6 — and that continue to spur real-world violence.”

In 2021, Facebook shut down Mr. Trump’s account after the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol for inciting violence, before later reinstating him. Multiple studies have since shown that interventions like Facebook’s fact-checks were effective at reducing belief in falsehoods and reducing how often such content was shared.

But Meta’s move elated conservative allies of Mr. Trump, many of whom have disliked Meta’s practice of adding disclaimers or warnings to questionable or false posts. Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, said in a post on X that Meta “finally admits to censoring speech” and called the change “a huge win for free speech.”

Other Republicans were skeptical. Senator Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee, said in a post on X that Meta’s change was “a ploy to avoid being regulated.”

Inside Meta, Mr. Zuckerberg’s announcements were met by praise and horror. For some employees, Mr. Zuckerberg was finally being his “authentic self,” uninhibited by “woke” critics, three current and former employees said.

Others said Mr. Zuckerberg was throwing current and former employees under the bus despite their efforts on content moderation. As upset employees posted about the changes on internal message boards, human resources workers quickly removed the posts, the people said, saying they broke the rules of a company policy on community engagement. Meta put the policy in place in 2022 to keep contentious social issues out of the workplace.

Meta’s decision to move moderation teams from California to Texas to “eliminate bias” attracted particular internal attention, the people said. The company has long had workers on moderation topics in Texas, the people said. In private channels and group chats, others remarked on how it was fine to criticize Meta’s policy on free speech — unless you did it from inside the company.

Meta’s fact-checking policy was born out of Mr. Trump’s previous election win, in 2016. At the time, Facebook came under fire for the unchecked dissemination of misinformation across its network, including posts from foreign governments angling to sow discord among the American public.

After enormous public pressure, Mr. Zuckerberg turned to outside organizations like The Associated Press, ABC News and the fact-checking site Snopes, along with other global organizations vetted by the International Fact-Checking Network, to comb over potentially false or misleading posts on Facebook and Instagram and rule whether they needed to be annotated or removed.

The company spent the next eight years investing billions of dollars, thousands of people and devoting enormous technological resources to fixing content moderation issues. Mr. Zuckerberg tapped more than a dozen outside firms to help police posts, including an army of contractors from firms like Accenture to do much of the manual work of reviewing posts.

Mr. Zuckerberg also stressed the importance of artificial intelligence in handling many of these issues, given that nearly half the people on earth regularly post to one or more of Meta’s apps.

But over time, Mr. Zuckerberg grew frustrated with the lack of credit the company was given for trying to tamp down misinformation, two people close to the chief executive said. He felt that the time and effort Meta had put into the initiative was seeing diminishing returns, they said.

Mr. Zuckerberg expressed that frustration in a speech at Georgetown University in 2019, in which he said he did not want his social network to be “an arbiter of speech.” He said Facebook had been founded to give people a voice, and that critics who assailed the company for doing so were setting a dangerous example.

Mr. Zuckerberg also regretted the pressure that the Biden administration put on him to take down content related to Covid-19, a sentiment he relayed publicly in a letter to Congress last year. In the letter, Mr. Zuckerberg said the administration overreached in requests to take down content, “including humor and satire.” In hindsight, Meta should have pushed back more on the White House’s requests, he said.

By 2022, Meta had begun winnowing some of its content moderation and policy teams as part of widespread corporate cost cutting. The company continues to make strategic cuts on a rolling basis.

Among the changes announced on Tuesday were the removal of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender identity that Mr. Zuckerberg said were “out of touch with mainstream discourse.” Meta said it would begin phasing in more personalized political content, based on the signals people gave about what they were interested in seeing in their feeds.

Mr. Zuckerberg has evolved personally, too. In recent years, he has grown closer to Mr. White of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, and has immersed himself in the right-leaning environment of professional fighting. He has become tired of the constant attacks on him and his company and found dealing with Mr. Biden’s proactive approach to reining in the tech industry frustrating, two people familiar with his thinking said.

Above all else, the incoming Trump administration and its focus on free speech allows Meta to finally free itself from the Sisyphean task of monitoring the billions of posts that flow through its apps.

“We have a new administration coming in that is far from pressuring companies to censor and a huge supporter of free expression,” Mr. Kaplan said on Fox. “It gets us back to the values that Mark founded the company on.”

Kate Conger and Stuart A. Thompson contributed reporting.