Facebook shuts down fact-checking, makes board changes

Meta announced sweeping changes overnight to Facebook and Instagram, including shutting down fact checking in a move CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledges could allow more harmful content on the platform.

Mark Zuckerberg announced Meta is abandoning its fact-checking program as he criticized the system for becoming “too politically biased.”

The tech billionaire unveiled the changes in a video on Tuesday. Zuckerberg said his companies — which include Facebook and Instagram — would instead implement a “community notes” model similar to the one used on X, which is owned by Elon Musk.

The policy shift comes as tech companies attempt to curry favor with President-elect Donald Trump following the Republican’s election triumph in November.

“After Trump first got elected in 2016, the legacy media wrote non-stop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy,” Meta’s chief executive said. “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.”

Starting in the U.S., Meta will end its fact-checking program with independent third parties and pivot to “community notes,” a system that relies on users adding notes or corrections to posts that may contain false or misleading information.

Zuckerberg also indicated a new direction on speech, announcing Meta will also “remove restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are out of touch with mainstream discourse.”

“What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas,” Zuckerberg said. “And it’s gone too far. So I want to make sure that people can share their beliefs and experiences on our platforms.”

He conceded that there would be more “bad stuff” on the platform as a result of the decisions. “The reality is that this is a trade-off,” he said.