Not Long Ago, Americans Wanted More Fact Checking Online
Earlier this week, Meta – owner of Facebook, Instagram, Threads and WhatsApp and thus the largest social media company in the world – announced that it would end its third-party fact-checking program in the United States and move to community notes instead. By ditching professional fact-checking in favor of a community-based approach to fighting misinformation, Meta is following in the footsteps of X, which has embraced a similar system after Elon Musk’s takeover in 2022. In an uncharacteristic move, Meta even acknowledged this, name-checking its competitor several times in the official announcement of the policy change.
While critics fear that getting rid of professional fact-checking could open the floodgates to misinformation, which is already rampant on social media, Meta argues that its previous approach was prone to over-policing content, effectively resulting in “censorship” – a word often used by conservative voices who see content moderation as an assault on freedom of speech. “Meta’s platforms are built to be places where people can express themselves freely. That can be messy. On platforms where billions of people can have a voice, all the good, bad and ugly is on display. But that’s free expression,” Meta’s Chief Global Affairs Office Joel Kaplan said in a statement.
“It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression,” Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and Meta CEO, said in a video announcing the changes, admitting that the move wouldn’t be without consequences. “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.”
In recent months, the debate around this trade off has turned, as more people – especially conservatives led by Elon Musk – have accused platforms such as Facebook and Instagram of abusing content moderation to silence voices that ran counter the “mainstream agenda”. Three separate surveys by the Pew Research Center, conducted in 2018, 2021 and 2023, found that a growing share Americans wanted tech companies to do more to restrict false information online – not less. In 2023, just 32 percent of respondents thought that tech companies should protect freedom of expression, even if it came at the expense of more misinformation being spread. A trade-off that Mark Zuckerberg and Meta are now willing to make.
Meta’s move is widely considered an attempt to curry favor with the incoming Trump administration. After not seeing eye to eye with Trump during his first presidency, Mark Zuckerberg appears to be seeking a more amicable relationship with the president-elect, who has been a vocal critic of Meta’s content moderation in the past.