Meta axes fact-checking program, is working with Trump administration to “promote free expression”

Meta is sucking up to the incoming Trump administration.

In a video posted this morning, founder/CEO Mark Zuckerberg said his company is making major changes with the way it handles misinformation–starting with eliminating its official fact-checking program and replacing professional checkers with an X-clone Community Notes system.

It also plans to move its trust & safety content moderation teams from California to Texas because it thinks it will “help us build trust to do this work in places where there is less concern about the bias of our teams,” Zuckerberg said.

Launched in 2016, the fact-checking program was a partnership with nearly 100 authoritative organizations around the world. Its goal? To “identify and address viral misinformation, particularly clear hoaxes that have no basis in fact,” according to Meta. The legion of fact-checkers combated “provably false claims that are timely, trending and consequential” by clearly labeling misinformation and, at times, repressing the spread of it across Meta’s platforms.

But that’s all going away because, as Zuckerberg claims, “governments and legacy media have pushed to censor more and more” since Trump first took office.

“We’ve reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship,” Zuckerberg said. “The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards, once again, prioritizing speech. So we’re gonna get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies and restoring free expression on our platforms.”

He added, “Starting in the U.S. after Trump first got elected in 2016, the legacy media wrote non-stop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy. We tried, in good faith, to address those concerns without becoming the arbiters of truth, but the fact-checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created, especially in the U.S.”

As part of “restoring free expression,” Meta is working directly with the incoming Trump administration, Zuckerberg said. This partnership includes bringing on UFC President and longtime vocal Trump supporter Dana White

as a board member at Meta.

“We’re going to work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world that are going after American companies and pushing to censor more,” Zuckerberg said. “The only way that we can push back on this global trend is with the support of the U.S. government, and that’s why it’s been so difficult over the past four years. When even the U.S. government has pushed for censorship by going after us and other American companies, it has emboldened other governments to go even further. But now we have the opportunity to restore free expression, and I am excited to take it.”

If you’re thinking Zuck’s language around free speech sounds familiar, that’s because it mirrors what Elon Musk—who’s also involved in the Trump administration—said when he bought X. The platform has since become a haven for hate speech, but has on multiple occasions suspended and/or de-verified accounts of people Musk appears to personally dislike.

Meta didn’t say what its version of Community Notes will look like, but it did confirm that it has similarly decided to loosen content moderation rules around user discussions of topics like “immigration, gender identity and gender that are the subject of frequent political discourse and debate.”

“[I]t’s not right that things can be said on TV or the floor of Congress, but not on our platforms,” Joel Kaplan, Meta’s Chief Global Affairs Officer, wrote in a company blog post about the decision.

Meta is clearly making these changes because it wants to stay in the Trump administration’s good graces. But no matter how hard the “post-truth era” is pushed, facts are not subjective, and misinformation surged during Trump’s first term. It might do the same during his second–now with fewer watchdogs to check it.