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Small toy figures are seen in front of Meta's logo in this illustration taken, October 28, 2021. — Reuters
#Meta #abruptly #ends #factchecks #ahead #Trump #term
WASHINGTON: Social media giant Meta on Tuesday eased its content moderation policies, including ending its U.S. fact-checking program, in a major shift that President-elect Donald Trump’s According to preferences.
“We’re going to get rid of fact-checkers (who) have been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust,” Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a post. have done what they’ve created, especially in the US,” Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a post.
Instead, meta-platforms, including Facebook and Instagram, will “use community notices similar to X (formerly Twitter) launched in the US.”
Meta’s surprise announcement echoed long-standing complaints by Trump’s Republican Party and X owner Elon Musk about fact-checking that many conservatives see as censorship.
They argue that fact-checking programs disproportionately target right-wing voices, which has led to proposed laws in states like Florida and Texas to limit content moderation.
“Recent elections feel like a cultural tipping point again, favoring speech over moderation,” Zuckerberg said.
The change comes as the 40-year-old tycoon has been trying to reconcile with Trump since his election in November, including a $1 million donation to his inaugural fund.
Trump has been a vocal critic of Meta and Zuckerberg for years, accusing the company of bias against him.
The Republican was removed from Facebook following the attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, although the company reinstated his account in early 2023.
Zuckerberg dined with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort in November in a sign of strengthening ties.
Ending ‘Facebook Jail’
In another recent nod to the Trump team, Metta last week named former Republican official Joel Kaplan to head public affairs at the company, taking over from former British Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg.
“Too much innocuous content gets censored, too many people find themselves wrongly imprisoned in ‘Facebook jail,'” Kaplan said in a statement, insisting that the company is committed to content moderation. The related approach “has gone too far.”
In his moves toward Republicans, Zuckerberg also named Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) chief Dana White, a close Trump ally, to the Meta board.
As part of the overhaul, Metta said he would move his trust and safety teams from liberal California to more conservative Texas.
“This will help us build the confidence to do this in places where our teams are less concerned about bias,” Zuckerberg said.
Zuckerberg also took a shot at the European Union “which has an increasing number of laws institutionalizing censorship and making it difficult to do anything innovative there.”
He cited new laws in Europe that require Meta and other major platforms to uphold content moderation standards or risk heavy fines.
Zuckerberg said Meta will “work with President Trump to push back against foreign governments further censoring American companies.”
Additionally, Meta announced that it will reverse its 2021 policy of reducing political content on its platforms.
Instead, the company will take a more personalized approach, giving users more control over the amount of political content they see on Facebook, Instagram and Threads.
AFP currently works with Facebook’s fact-checking program in 26 languages, in which Facebook pays for fact-checking from around 80 organizations globally on its platform, WhatsApp and Instagram.
In this program, content classified as “fake” in news feeds is reduced so that fewer people see it, and if someone tries to share the post, they are presented with an article that I explain why this is misleading.
Community Notes
Community Notes on X (formerly Twitter) allows users to collaboratively add context to posts in a system that aims to find trusted information through consensus rather than top-down moderation.
Meta’s move to fact-checking came after Trump’s shock election in 2016, which critics said was enabled by rampant misinformation on Facebook and meddling on the platform by foreign actors like Russia. done
