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Analysis
Why did
Mark Zuckerberg end Facebook and Instagram’s factchecking program?
Blake
Montgomery
The social
media giant enters a more partisan political era as its CEO pursues Donald
Trump’s approval
Tue 7 Jan
2025 19.47 GMT
Meta is
shifting to the right, following the prevailing political winds blowing through
the United States. A more partisan era now looms for the social media giant and
its corporate leaders, though Mark Zuckerberg himself has few personal politics
other than ambition.
On Tuesday
morning, Meta disbanded Facebook and Instagram’s third-party factchecking
program. The company will also recommend more political content across its
social networks.
CEO
Zuckerberg announced the changes as he attempts to curry favor with Donald
Trump’s incoming administration, demonstrating just how far he will go to win
the president-elect’s approval.
“Recent
elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again
prioritizing speech,” he said in a video posted on Instagram. “Factcheckers
have just been too politically biased.”
Notes from
everyday users will replace corrections from vetted factchecking partners,
similar to Twitter/X’s Community Notes feature. In a post on Threads, Meta’s
answer to X, Zuckerberg also vowed to reduce “censorship mistakes”, rhetoric
that mirrors US conservatives’ longstanding charges that Facebook and Instagram
unfairly penalize conservatives, for which there is little evidence. He
lambasted coverage of Trump by “legacy media, which has pushed to censor more
and more” and said that his own company’s previous content moderation policies
resulted in “too much censorship” and had “gone too far”.
Trump
immediately welcomed the changes. Asked if Zuckerberg was making so many rapid
changes in response to invective from Trump – the president-elect threatened
the CEO with “life in prison” in August – Trump said: “Probably. Yeah.
Probably.” Trump told Fox News that Meta had “come a long way” and that its
“presentation was excellent”.
The night
before, Meta announced the appointment of Dana White, CEO of Ultimate Fighting
Championship (UFC), the de facto sport of the Maga movement, to its board.
White has backed Trump since 2016.
Last week,
the company rid itself of its most prominent centrist, Nick Clegg, former UK
deputy prime minister, and elevated its most prominent conservative to its top
policy job, Joel Kaplan, former deputy chief of staff to the Republican US
president George W Bush. It was Kaplan who authored the blogpost pronouncing
the factchecking initiative dead. Kaplan has championed conservative causes
inside and outside Meta. Within, he has pushed Meta to partner with rightwing
news websites on factchecking; placed prominent Republicans in key roles; and
advocated for Facebook not to restrict fake news, arguing such a crackdown
would unfairly penalize conservatives. Without, he championed the nomination of
the conservative justice Brett Kavanaugh to the US supreme court. When
Kavanaugh was called to testify about allegations of sexual assault, Kaplan sat
behind him, visible on the aisle seat of the Senate chamber.
Meta – not
Zuckerberg personally – donated $1m to Trump’s inaugural fund, as have a host
of tech leaders. The CEO did dine with Trump at Mar-a-Lago two weeks ago and
gifted him a pair of Meta Ray-Bans, the company’s camera-equipped glasses.
Meta’s most
well-connected Democrat, Sheryl Sandberg, is no longer its chief operating
officer nor even on its board. Zuckerberg has replaced her with White. Where
Sheryl Sandberg wrote the manual for white-collar feminism, Lean In, White was
filmed slapping his wife at a party in 2022 after she slapped him.
Aping Elon:
moving from California to Texas
Zuckerberg’s
moves mirror steps Elon Musk, who gave about $200m to elect Trump, has taken in
his haphazard management of X. Musk likewise dispensed with any third-party
factchecking on X in favor of elevating Community Notes, though there was less
there to begin with than on Facebook, Instagram and Threads.
“In a shift
driven largely by Trump ally and X-owner Elon Musk, third-party factchecking
has gone out of fashion among social executives. Social platforms have become
more political and polarized, as misinformation has become a buzzword that
encompasses everything from outright lies to viewpoints people disagree with,”
said the eMarketer principal Jasmine Enberg.
Zuckerberg’s
plays for approval from conservatives may spook liberals and even advertisers
if Facebook and Instagram’s brand safety declines. They are ultimately unlikely
to hurt Meta’s bottom line, though, she said. “Meta’s massive size and
powerhouse ad platform insulate it somewhat from an X-like user and advertiser
exodus. But any major drop-off in engagement could hurt Meta’s ad business,
given the intense competition for users and ad dollars,” she said.
In
announcing the dissolution of Facebook and Instagram’s factchecking, Zuckerberg
said he would likewise shunt Meta’s content moderation teams from the Golden
state to the Lone Star state. The CEO said the change of location would “help
remove the concern that biased employees are overly censoring content”. Musk
moved X’s headquarters to Texas from California, as he has done with SpaceX and
Tesla.
Zuckerberg
believes that Trump is dictating the terms of mainstream discourse in 2025. The
CEO wrote that Meta would “remove restrictions on topics like immigration and
gender that are out of touch with mainstream discourse”. Immigration and gender
– two of Trump’s main campaign issues, harped on about again and again at his
speeches. A dozen years ago, Zuckerberg wrote that immigration was vital to the
US’s white-collar economy as he founded an organization to facilitate more of
it, aligning with thrust of Barack Obama’s policies with the help of Sandberg.
If one state
is biased, so is its replacement. Facebook and Instagram are so large that
their terms of service in effect set the Overton window for online conversation
across the world. That window has moved to the political right. The politics
and laws of the state California allows people obtaining driver’s licenses to
choose a non-binary option for their gender, X. Texas, by contrast, bans
gender-affirming care for transgender minors. California’s governor has vowed
to defend healthcare providers performing out-of-state abortions. Texas
instituted a six-week abortion ban in 2021 before Roe v Wade was overturned.
The laws and politics of the state will in part determine the acceptable range
of discussion on Facebook and Instagram.
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