Meta announces end to its fact-checking program in the US
Echoing Republican complaints about fact-checking programs, Meta's founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a major rollback of its content moderation policies, amid moves to reconcile with Donald Trump.
"Social media giant Meta on Tuesday, January 7, slashed its content moderation policies, including ending its US fact-checking program, in a major shift that conforms with the priorities of incoming president Donald Trump.
- Instead, Meta platforms, including Facebook and Instagram, "would use community notes similar to X (formerly Twitter), starting in the US," he added.
Zuckerberg said that "recent elections feel like a cultural tipping point towards, once again, prioritizing speech" over moderation. The shift came as the 40-year-old tycoon has been making efforts to reconcile with Trump since his election in November, including donating one million dollars to his inauguration fund.
Trump has been a harsh critic of Meta and Zuckerberg for years, accusing the company of bias against him. The Republican was kicked off Facebook following the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol, though the company restored his account in early 2023.
Zuckerberg dined with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort in November in a sign of strengthening ties.
In another recent gesture towards the Trump team, Meta last week named Joel Kaplan, a former Republican official, to head up public affairs at the company, taking over from Nick Clegg, a former British deputy prime minister.
- "Too much harmless content gets censored, too many people find themselves wrongly locked up in 'Facebook jail,'" Kaplan said in a statement, insisting that the company's approach to content moderation had "gone too far."
As part of the overhaul, Meta said it will relocate its trust and safety teams from liberal California to more conservative Texas.
- This made reference to new laws in Europe that require Meta and other major platforms to maintain content moderation standards or risk hefty fines.
Additionally, Meta announced it would reverse its 2021 policy of reducing political content across its platforms.
Instead, the company will adopt a more personalized approach, allowing users greater control over the amount of political content they see on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads.
AFP currently works in 26 languages with Facebook's fact-checking program, in which Facebook pays to use fact-checks from around 80 organizations globally on its platform, WhatsApp and on Instagram.
In that program, content rated "false" is downgraded in news feeds so fewer people will see it and if someone tries to share that post, they are presented with an article explaining why it is misleading.
No comments:
Post a Comment