Meta killed outside fact-checking solely to placate Donald Trump

Meta last week announced the end of its third-party fact-checking program with a lot of talk about promoting free speech, ending censorship and getting back to its roots. 

Don’t be fooled. The change is best understood not as the product of reconsidered principles but as a political message with an audience of one: Donald Trump.

That is not to say that the move lacks meaning or consequence beyond currying favor with the once and future president. Meta’s decision will have devastating effects on — and could largely destroy — the fragile infrastructure of third-party fact-checking for social media. In so doing, it will contribute significantly to the anti-truth environment rapidly enveloping social media and beyond.

Meta first introduced outside fact-checking in 2017 in response to a credibility crisis caused by the revelation of how Russian operatives had manipulated Facebook and Instagram (as well as YouTube and Twitter) to spread disinformation and sow discord during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign. Seeking to tamp down a public relations fire and forestall government regulation, Meta began paying outsiders to vet the accuracy of a tiny fraction of the content on its platforms.

These outsiders ranged from established news operations such as the Associated Press to specialized fact-checkers like the Pulitzer Prize-winning PolitiFact and less well-known ones like the small Indian nonprofit Boom. All of them were certified by the International Fact-Checking Network run by the venerable Poynter journalism ethics and training organization. 

At its peak, Meta’s fact-checking system employed more than 90 groups worldwide, some of which also did work for other platforms that had followed Meta’s lead.

It was far from a comprehensive or seamless process. Using traditional journalistic reporting and analysis, fact-checking groups reviewed a selection of claims by politicians, online influencers and other social media denizens whose content for some reason went viral.

Fact-checkers typically prioritized disputed content on matters of public import, publishing their findings on their own websites and leaving it to the social media platforms to use the assessments as they saw fit. 

At Meta, posts that were deemed false were pushed down in users’ feeds, meaning they were made less visible. Some extremely dangerous false content, such as claims that drinking bleach could prevent COVID-19 or that vaccines contain microchips, were removed altogether.

Given the scale of social media content and the scarce resources available to fact-checkers, even with Meta’s support, the endeavor never pretended to filter out the majority of online falsehoods. But it signaled that there is a line between true and false and that at least on the most important issues of the day, the major platforms bear some responsibility for not spreading misinformation that can undermine public health and democratic institutions.

Sadly, fact-checking got swept up into a broader conservative campaign designed to blur the distinction between truth and falsehood. Led by Trump, beginning during his first term in the White House, the campaign lumped together the mainstream media (“the enemy of the people,” in Trump’s words), social media companies and ultimately the Biden administration and academic tech policy researchers in what was alleged to be a vast conspiracy to censor the political right and silence its leaders. 

Over time, the conservative campaign — pursued through lawsuits, congressional hearings and online agitation by influencers like Elon Musk — gained considerable traction, even though its proponents never presented factual evidence of a systematic effort to marginalize right-leaning voices. Led by Musk, who rolled back content moderation generally, including fact-checking, when in 2022 he acquired the platform he renamed X, social media companies diluted or reversed policies designed to reduce misinformation.

Now, it is fact-checking’s turn on the guillotine. The context of Meta’s announcement is crucial. It follows a series of statements and actions by the company meant to signal its eagerness to placate Trump, who in past years has gone so far as to threaten Zuckerberg with prison time for his supposed hostility toward his political movement. 

Since Trump’s victory in November, Zuckerberg has traveled to Mar-a-Lago to personally congratulate the victor, arranged a $1 million Meta donation to Trump’s inaugural celebration, ended the company’s diversity, equity and inclusion programs and appointed a Trump crony, Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO Dana White, to Meta’s board of directors.

In early January, Zuckerberg promoted Joel Kaplan, a former Republican operative with ties to the Trump camp, to Meta’s number two executive position, chief global affairs officer. 

Last week, when Kaplan went on “Fox & Friends” (a Trump favorite) to announce the end of outside fact-checking, he took the occasion to lash out at the Biden administration in unmistakably Trump-like terms: 

“When you have a U.S. president, administration, that is pushing for censorship, it just makes it open season for other governments around the world that don’t even have the protections of the First Amendment to really put pressure on U.S. companies.”

In a series of posts on Meta’s Threads platform, Zuckerberg framed the fact-checking decision as part of his plan to “work with President Trump to push back against foreign governments going after American companies to censor more.”

In a video on the company’s website, Zuckerberg said that for the last four years (read: during the Biden administration), “governments and legacy media have pushed to censor more and more.”

Trump’s return to power will reverse that trend, he predicted in a celebratory vein. 

“The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point toward once again prioritizing speech,” he said. “So we’re going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes and simplifying our policies and restoring free expression on our platforms.”

Some of this will be accomplished by adjusting automated filters so they focus more on “illegal and high-severity violations,” Zuckerberg said on Threads. He added that the company will “move our trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California, and our U.S. content review to Texas. This will help remove the concern that biased employees are overly censoring content.”

Meta “recently gave a heads-up to Trump officials about the change in policy,” the New York Times reported.

Meta is following the example of Musk, who last year moved the headquarters of X and his rocket company, SpaceX, from California to Texas. Likewise, Meta said it would imitate X’s transfer of fact-checking responsibilities to its users in a program called "community notes.”  

X’s community notes at times have allowed corrections of dubious content to surface quickly, but skeptics have noted that the approach often leads to fact-checks never getting published or descending into partisan bickering.

In any event, it’s not clear why Meta needed to kill fact-checking in order to experiment with crowdsourced commentary. The two methods are not mutually exclusive.

Unless, of course, Meta’s primary goal was to make a splashy announcement that set it apart from its Silicon Valley rivals in the ongoing industry scramble to appeal to Trump and his allies.

Paul Barrett is the deputy director of the Center for Business and Human Rights at New York University’s Stern School of Business.