January 07, 2025 10:28 AM UTC

Meta Gives Up on Truth to Please Trump

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• by: Colorado Pols

UPDATE: President-elect Trump is already claiming the scalp, as The Washington Post reports:

Trump said Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg “probably” ended the company’s fact-checking program because of the threats Trump had made against the company.

Speaking at his news conference in Palm Beach, Florida, Trump said the decision was very “impressive.”

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As The New York Times reports, the company that includes Facebook, Instagram, and Threads has formally bent the knee in front of President-elect Donald Trump:

Meta on Tuesday announced changes to its content moderation practices that would effectively end a fact-checking program instituted to curtail the spread of misinformation across its social media apps. Instead of using news organizations and other third-party groups, Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and Threads, will rely on users to add notes to posts that may contain false or misleading information.

The reversal of the years-old policy is a stark sign of how the company is repositioning itself for the Trump presidency in the weeks before it begins. Meta described the changes with the language of a mea culpa: Joel Kaplan, Meta’s newly installed global policy chief, said in a statement that the company wanted to “undo the mission creep that has made our rules too restrictive and too prone to over-enforcement.”

Meta’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, said in a video that the new protocol, which will begin in the United States in the coming months, is similar to the one used by X, called Community Notes.

“It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression,” Mr. Zuckerberg said. The company’s current fact-checking system, he added, had “reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship.”

We should be more like the social network formerly known as Twitter, said nobody else, ever.

Meta’s obsequiousness toward Trump is nauseating:

Mr. Zuckerberg conceded that there would be more “bad stuff” on the platform 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.” [Pols emphasis]

Advance notice: Meta executives recently gave a heads-up to Trump officials about the change in policy, according to a person with knowledge of the conversations who spoke on condition of anonymity. The fact-checking announcement coincided with an appearance by Joel Kaplan, Meta’s newly installed global policy chief, on “Fox & Friends,” a favorite show of President-elect Donald J. Trump. Mr. Kaplan told the hosts of the morning show popular with conservatives that there was “too much political bias” in the fact-checking program.

As The Washington Post reports, this is just part of Zuckerberg’s Trumpian turn:

The announcement marks the latest in a flurry of changes at Meta as Zuckerberg repositions the company for a second Trump administration. Last week, the company named Joel Kaplan, a Republican with deep experience in Washington, as its chief global affairs officer, replacing former British politician Nick Clegg. And on Monday, it named Dana White, a Trump ally and president of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, to its board of directors.

Rad.