Mark Zuckerberg (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Tuesday that the company will no longer rely on "politically biased" fact-checkers to censor content, pledging to restore "free expression" on its Facebook, Instagram, and Threads platforms.
"We're going to get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with Community Notes similar to X, starting in the U.S.," the Meta CEO said. "The fact-checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they've created."
Meta will also "get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse," Zuckerberg said. "What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas. And it's gone too far."
Zuckerberg, who said Meta will "work with President Trump" on promoting free speech around the world, criticized the Biden administration, saying that "over the past four years … even the U.S. government has pushed for censorship." He admitted in a letter last August to the House Judiciary Committee that the Biden administration pressured Meta to "censor" COVID-19 content during the pandemic and expressed regret for not speaking out sooner about the situation.
The Meta CEO's statement is likely part of his wider effort to win over Republicans. Zuckerberg dined with Trump in November and promoted Republican Joel Kaplan to be Meta's policy chief, while the company donated $1 million to the president-elect's inauguration fund.
The Community Notes model, introduced by Elon Musk's X, will let Meta users flag potentially misleading posts and add context, shifting responsibility away from independent fact-checking organizations. Meta rolled out its third-party fact-checking program following the 2016 presidential election, largely due to "political pressure," Kaplan has said.
Fact-checkers have slammed Zuckerberg's decision, with Aaron Sharockman, the executive director of PolitiFact, a major partner in Meta's fact-checking program, saying that "the decision to remove or penalize a post or account is made by Meta and Facebook, not fact-checkers. They created the rules."
PolitiFact has a long history of subjecting Republicans to fact checks while assessing Democrats to be far more truthful, the Washington Free Beacon reported. In one instance in 2022, PolitiFact determined President Joe Biden's claim that he was a University of Pennsylvania professor to be false but nevertheless evaluated it "half-true."
Kaplan, meanwhile, echoed Zuckerberg's sentiment. "There is a real opportunity here, with President Trump coming into office, with his commitment to free expression, for us to get back to those values," Kaplan said Tuesday in a Fox News interview.
