A lot can change in four years. In January 2021, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg booted then-President Donald Trump off of his social network, as well as Instagram, with Zuckerberg saying “the risks” of keeping Trump on those platforms — where he had a combined 56 million followers — was “simply too great.”
That decision is now a relic of a bygone era.
Zuckerberg on Tuesday said his company, now dubbed Meta, was canceling its third-party fact checking operation and would cut back on policing hot button topics like immigration. In its place, Meta will be rolling out a feature similar to X’s Community Notes, which allows users to add context to posts that may be misleading or false.
“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.
Meta’s change signals a clear shift in the tech zeitgeist as Trump is set to return to the White House later this month. It highlights the complications major tech companies have faced and will continue to confront when it comes to censoring content — something that Silicon Valley has euphemistically rebranded as “content moderation” in recent years. Zuckerberg now feels emboldened to lean into his personal laissez-faire approach to free speech — a move that sees him taking a digital hammer to the moderation system his company put in place following Trump’s first victory in 2016.
“This was a content moderation apparatus that Mark Zuckerberg never felt comfortable with and implemented under severe public pressure in response to the 2016 election,” Matt Bilinsky, a tech-focused attorney and Fox News contributor, told TheWrap. “And with cultural shifts and the results of the 2024 election, he’s now found cover to return more to the principles that he founded Facebook on, which is more open to the free expression of ideas.”
Meta launched its fact checking program following the 2016 election, after media outlets and late night talk show hosts criticized the company for not doing enough to police Facebook ads and user posts from so-called “fake news.”
“People have amnesia about just how strong the public pressure was on Facebook” to add fact checkers following Trump’s 2016 victory, Bilinsky said.
In the aftermath, the company partnered with ABC News, AP, Politifact, Snopes, and FactCheck.org to flag content that was called false or misleading by third-party fact checkers. Posts that were deemed unreliable by Facebook’s fact-checkers were pushed further down in its news feed. Facebook’s third-party fact checkers also started slapping warning labels on content, alerting users that fact checkers “disputed” the accuracy of stories that did not pass their smell test.
Since then, Zuckerberg has had to balance his personal views on free speech with his obligation to shareholders as the leader of a $1.56 trillion company. Outgoing FTC Chairwoman Lina Khan on Tuesday suggested Zuckerberg was looking for “sweetheart deals” from the incoming Trump administration in its upcoming antitrust lawsuit. Bilinsky disagrees, telling TheWrap it was unlikely Zuckerberg made his decision to boost Meta’s odds of winning the case, saying the executive was already “moving in this direction before the election.”
Heading into this week, the signs were there that Zuckerberg was not completely on board with his company’s fact checking operation. Notably, he issued a vehement defense of free expression online during a speech at Georgetown University in 2019.
“As a principle, in a democracy, I believe people should decide what is credible, not tech companies,” Zuckerberg said at Georgetown.
And his distaste for Meta’s content rules appeared to grow as Trump’s reelection grew more likely.
Last August, Zuckerberg skewered the Biden Administration for pushing Meta to flag what it deemed was COVID-19 misinformation. The 40-year-old exec said it “was wrong” that the Biden Administration “repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree.”
His anti-moderation sentiment has mirrored Elon Musk’s approach to X. Musk was critical of X – then known as Twitter – for blocking users from reading the New York Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop in the weeks leading up to the 2020 election. After buying the platform in late 2022, Musk said X would emphasize free speech, which he said was the “bedrock of a functioning democracy.” (X hasn’t always lived up to that ideal. The platform blocked a journalist this week for reporting Musk was not secretly behind a well-known pro-Musk X account.)
And Zuckerberg’s shift towards a less-policed Facebook and Instagram comes as the majority of Americans have shown they do not favor content policing from social media companies. A 2024 poll from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), a pro-First Amendment nonprofit organization, found most Americans do not trust social media moderation.
FIRE said in its poll summary that 61% of Democrats, 62% of Independents, and 73% of Republicans “don’t trust social media companies to be fair about what can be posted on their platform.”
Ari Cohn, FIRE’s lead counsel on tech policy, told TheWrap that Zuckerberg’s decision to ditch third-party fact checkers was a shrewd move, because “there have been some fact checkers who have been biased and have eroded trust.” (Zuckerberg said as much in his comments on Tuesday, saying fact checkers had become “too politically biased,” which had “destroyed” the public’s faith in their ability in recent years.)
“It’s a good thing when platforms voluntarily try to make their decisions less biased and less arbitrary, even though it’s important to recognize they have the First Amendment right to make the editorial content decisions that they choose whether it’s less biased or more biased,” Cohn said. “And that is how it should be.”
Musk and Trump also gave thumbs up to Zuckerberg’s decision on Tuesday. Musk called Meta’s decision “cool” and “awesome” in separate X posts, and the president-elect said Meta had “come a long way” during a press conference from Mar-a-Lago. Trump added Zuckerberg – who he called “the man” – was “very impressive.”
But not everyone is singing the Meta CEO’s praises.
Haley Lickstein, a political strategist and former Meta employee who worked on the company’s “social and economic impact team,” said the decision to end fact checking was unwise, considering social media is the go-to news source for Millennials and Gen Z. (A Pew survey in September found 54% of Americans get some of their news from social platforms.) .
“I’m very disappointed to see the news that we are no longer going to be fact checking information,” Lickstein said. “It’s incredibly dangerous and incredibly irresponsible.”
Will other platforms follow Zuckerberg’s lead?
It’s unclear if other tech platforms, like Snapchat and LinkedIn, will alter their moderation policies after Trump takes office. TikTok will also be worth watching, if it remains in the U.S. The popular app, owned by Beijing-based Bytedance, is facing a Jan. 19 ban. TikTok is no stranger to content moderation, with the app heavily censoring content about the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre or the Chinese communist party’s treatment of the Uyghurs, according to a new report from The Free Press.
Cohn did add one caveat to Meta’s updated policy. He said there was “room for concern” that it came on the heels of Brendan Carr, Trump’s pick to be FCC Chairman, sending a letter to Meta, Alphabet, Apple and Microsoft in November that was highly critical of their fact check operations. But Cohn noted there was no evidence to suggest Zuckerberg’s call was coerced.
“I hope that Meta will continue to resist heavy-handed government pressure,” Cohn said, “because if there’s anything that is an undeniable threat to free speech, it is when government starts dictating speech policies to private parties.”
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