Trump on Meta ending its fact-checking program.
CNN’s Steve Contorno: “Meta is saying that it’s going to stop putting fact checks on the — posts on its website and….Meta said today it would stop putting fact checks on its website and would instead allow community notes to fact-check.”
President-Elect Trump: “Well, I watched the news conference and I thought it was a very good news conference. I think they’ve — honestly, I think they have come a long way, Meta, Facebook. I think they’ve came a long way. I watched it. The man was very impressive. Actually, I watched it on Fox, I’m not allowed to say that.”
Contorno: [Inaudible]
Trump: “Say it?”
Contorno: “Do you think [Mark Zuckerberg’s] directly responding to the threats that you have made to him in the past of [inaudible]?”
Trump: “Probably. Yeah, probably.”
Zuck bends the knee, says he will bring back free speech and end media fact-checking
Meta is ending its fact-checking program and lifting restrictions on speech to “restore free expression” across Facebook, Instagram and Meta platforms, admitting its current content moderation practices have “gone too far.”
“We’re going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies and restoring free expression on our platforms,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a video posted on 1/7/2025. “More specifically, we’re going to get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with Community Notes similar to X, starting in the U.S.”
Zuckerberg said Meta’s “factcheckers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created”. The tech firm’s content moderation teams will be moved from California to Texas “where there is less concern about the bias of our teams”, he said. He admitted that changes to the way Meta filters content would mean “we’re going to catch less bad stuff”.
Zuckerberg said Meta would also “get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse” and “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: “Governments and legacy media have pushed to censor more and more. A lot of this is clearly political, but there’s also a lot of legitimately bad stuff out there, drugs, terrorism, child exploitation. These are things that we take very seriously, and I want to make sure that we handle responsibly.
“So we built a lot of complex systems to moderate content, but the problem with complex systems is they make mistakes, even if they accidentally censor just 1% of posts, that’s millions of people, and we’ve reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship. The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards, once again, prioritizing speech.”
He said that removing some restrictions on content on topics such as gender and immigration would “make sure that people can share their beliefs and experiences on our platforms” and he said the focus of filters that scan posts for policy violations would be shifted to only tackling illegal and high severity violations with Meta, relying on users to report lower severity violations before it takes action.
“By dialing them back, we’re going to dramatically reduce the amount of censorship on our platforms,” he said. “We’re also going to tune our content filters to require much higher confidence before taking down content. The reality is that this is a tradeoff. It means we’re going to catch less bad stuff, but we’ll also reduce innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally take down.”
https://www.facebook.com/HygoNewsUSA/videos/603679315933133
Trump on Meta Facebook ending fact-checking, Zuckerberg directly responding to Trump threats