'Ending that completely': Facebook gets rid of fact-checkers in wake of Trump's election

Facebook's parent company will make changes to its fact-checking to more closely resemble the site formerly known as Twitter.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Tuesday morning that content moderation and other restrictions on speech would be lifted across Facebook, Instagram and other platforms as Donald Trump returns to the White House, reported Fox News.

"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 posted Tuesday morning. "More specifically, we’re going to get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with Community Notes similar to X, starting in the U.S."

The company's third-party fact-checking program was put into place following Trump's first election win to "manage content" and misinformation on its platforms, which executives conceded was the result of "political pressure," but they now say that system has "gone too far."

"We went to independent, third-party fact-checkers," said Joel Kaplan, Meta’s chief global affairs officer. "It has become clear there is too much political bias in what they choose to fact-check because, basically, they get to fact-check whatever they see on the platform."

The company is "ending that completely," Kaplan said, and will instead rely on the platforms' users to flag false or misleading content.

"Instead of going to some so-called expert, it instead relies on the community and the people on the platform to provide their own commentary to something that they’ve read," Kaplan said.

If a note is supported by "the broadest cross-section of users" it will be attached to the post for other users to see.

"We think that’s a much better approach rather than relying on so-called experts who bring their own biases into the program," Kaplan said. "We want to make sure that discourse can happen freely on the platform without fear of censorship. We have the power to change the rules and make them more supportive of free expression, and we’re not just changing the rules, we are actually changing how we enforce the rules."

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Kaplan told Fox Digital the changes were not unrelated to Trump's impending presidency.

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

"The thing is, as American companies, when other governments around the world that don’t have our tradition or our First Amendment, when they see the United States government pressuring U.S. companies to take down content, it is just open season then for those governments to put more pressure [on their companies]," Kaplan added. "We do think it is a real opportunity to work with the Trump administration and to work on free expression at home."