Meta, Facebook End Fact-Checking Program

In a victory for free speech on social media, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Tuesday announced a series of major changes concerning the monitoring of content on its platforms.

The move comes less than two weeks before President-elect Donald Trump takes office and his new administration says they will make dealing with censorship a priority.

The changes will affect Facebook and Instagram, two of the world's largest social media platforms.

Zuckerberg announced three key takeaways:

• Ending a third-party fact-checking program, put in after the 2016 election, that aimed at censoring conservative voices and moving to a Community Notes model.

• Allowing more speech by lifting restrictions on some topics that are part of mainstream discourse and focusing our enforcement on illegal and high-severity violations.

• Increasing the personalization of political content so people who want to see more of it in their feeds can.

"We're gonna 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 cited Trump's election victory as a "cultural tipping point."

"The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point toward, once again, prioritizing speech," he said.

"So we're gonna get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies, and restoring free expression on our platforms."

Zuckerberg's announcement comes less than two months after Commissioner Brendan Carr, the senior Republican on the Federal Communications Commission and President Trump's proposed chairman, demanded Big Tech companies fess up about their censorship activities targeting conservatives under the Biden administration.

Carr asserted that these media monitors and fact-checkers masquerade as truth arbiters, but their real purpose has been "to defund, demonetize, and otherwise put out of business news outlets" that differed from establishment media thinking.

Carr specifically identified in his letter left-wing media monitor NewsGuard, which exists to "censor free speech and conservative news outlets."

NewsGuard was founded in 2018 by Steven Brill who has acted for decades as a Democratic Party donor, advocate, and activist.

Conservatives have been perplexed by NewsGuard, described as a left-wing organization by the Media Research Center, which has been used by major social media platforms and advertising firms to decide who gets web traffic and advertising revenues.

Respected legal scholar Jonathan Turley has described NewsGuard's activities as "Orwellian," pushing censorship and "blacklisting."

Turley notes the NewsGuard reports are "highly subjective" and not based on objective criteria. He was surprised NewsGuard demanded his blog describe itself as a "conservative."

Elon Musk has called NewsGuard a "scam" and says it is blatantly pushing a "political agenda" by seeking to censor alternative points of view. He has argued the organization should be "disbanded immediately."

Zuckerberg, whose company especially targeted conservative voices following the Jan. 6, 2021, attack at the U.S. Capitol, has been trying to repair his relationship with the president-elect after the Nov. 5 election, in which he earned an electoral landslide victory over Vice President Kamala Harris.

The CEO dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago in late November and Meta has donated $1 million to the president-elect's inaugural fund.

Earlier this month, Meta acknowledged "harmless content" was too often removed from its social media platforms during election season, infringing on "the free expression we set out to enable."

• FCC's Carr Probes Big Tech 'Censorship Cartel,' NewsGuard
• FTC's Andrew Ferguson Targets Big Tech, NewsGuard Censorship