Zuckerberg: Facebook ditching biased third-party ‘fact-checkers’

by WorldTribune Staff, January 7, 2025 Real World News

Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Tuesday said Facebook will no longer use third-party “fact-checkers” to police content.

“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. “More specifically, here’s what we’re going to do. First, we’re going to get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with community notes similar to X, starting in the U.S.”

Ya think? Mark Zuckerberg said Facebook’s fact-checkers had become too ‘politically biased.’ / Video Image

The policy also applies to Meta platforms Instagram and Threads, he said.

WorldTribune.com publisher Robert Morton, who estimates his company lost tens of thousands of dollars to Zuckerberg 1.0 policies and algorithms, had a 4-word response: “Show me the money.”

The Wall Street Journal noted: “The pivot comes as Zuckerberg has looked to align himself and his company with the incoming Trump administration. The Meta CEO has had a sometimes strained relationship with Trump in the past, which descended into open acrimony after Meta suspended Trump’s accounts in the wake of Jan. 6, 2021 invasion of the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters.

While the platforms will continue to target illegal behavior, Zuckerberg wrote in a separate post on Threads, it will stop enforcing content rules about immigration and gender that are “out of touch with mainstream discourse.”

Four years after banning Trump from Facebook over the J6 protest, Zuckerberg on Tuesday vowed to work with the new Trump administration to “push back on governments around the world going after American companies and pushing to censor more.”

Breitbart’s John Nolte noted on Tuesday: “Allow me to sum up what’s happening here… For the first time since the creation of mass media a hundred years ago, we are witnessing an end to the bad guys having control over the flow of information — control over what debate is acceptable, what questions are asked, what is and is not covered, what does and does not matter. In other words: The Narrative.

“We all saw it yesterday on January 6, as the corporate media pleasured themselves pretending that a mostly peaceful protest where no one brought weapons was an ‘insurrection.’ Nobody listened. No one cared. The media are Chubby Checker still singing ‘The Twist’ in 1991 while Normal People focus on what matters — the future at the hands of a president who actually loves his country.”

Mark Zuckerberg built up Facebook’s content-policing efforts in the wake of Donald Trump’s first presidential election. Now the Meta Platforms CEO is reversing course as he embraces a second Trump presidency.

In August, Zuckerberg sent a letter to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan saying that Joe Biden’s White House was wrong to pressure Facebook to censor content in 2021 related to the Covid-19 pandemic and that it wouldn’t comply with such efforts in the future.

The day before Thanksgiving, Zuckerberg dined with Trump on a patio at the president-elect’s private Mar-a-Lago club and gifted him a pair of Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses. Meta has since donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund.

The company on Monday said UFC President Dana White, a staunch supporter and ally of Trump, would be among three new members of its board of directors.

Meta’s decision to remove restrictions on certain types of speech echoes the approach taken by Elon Musk after he bought X, then called Twitter, in 2022. Under the Community Notes system, a note giving added context is appended to a post if enough users with a history of differing views agree that it is inaccurate or otherwise needs further information.

“This is cool,” Musk tweeted about Zuckerberg’s announcement.

In December, Musk had re-posted a post accusing Meta’s platforms of censoring conservative voices.

Speaking about Meta’s attempts to weed out damaging or dangerous content that violates its policies and puts users at risk, Zuckerberg said it had gone too far.

“We’ve reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship,” he said. “The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech.”

Zuckerberg directly referenced Trump several times in the video, criticizing the legacy media for their coverage of his first term in office. He also said that fact-checkers had become “too politically biased.”

Zuckerberg said Meta, which had reduced recommendations of political content, will start phasing such posts back into users’ feeds across Facebook, Instagram and Threads after getting feedback that people want to see this content again.

As expected, the “fact-checkers” were not pleased with Zuckerberg’s announcement.

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