By Anika S. '26
While “I read it on the Internet” has never inspired confidence in accuracy, people who get their news from two of the world’s largest social media platforms may want to exercise even greater caution before believing what they see online.
Instagram and Facebook owner, Meta, ended its fact-checking initiatives in January and turned to the online community to fact-check content following the presidential victory of Donald Trump, a historic opponent to Meta’s methods of preventing the spread of misinformation.
Established in December of 2016, Meta’s fact-checking program strove to identify and manage online misinformation through partnerships with third party fact-checkers. In his 2019 speech at Georgetown University, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg articulated the goal of Meta’s fact-checking initiatives: “work[ing] with independent fact-checkers to stop hoaxes that are going viral from spreading.”
Meta’s fact-checking and content moderation initiatives spiked following the 2016 election, when the FBI revealed Russia’s usage of Meta in attempts to manipulate voters. Many Republicans, including Trump, criticized Meta’s efforts, with Trump accusing Meta of having an anti-conservative bias.
Zuckerberg and Trump have had a complicated relationship, one that reached peak levels of tension when Zuckerberg banned Trump from his platforms following the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol, stating that the risk of Trump having a voice on Meta platforms was “simply too great.” Their relationship remained tense as the 2024 election approached, with Trump threatening to imprison Zuckerberg if he was seen to be manipulating the election, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Following Trump’s 2024 presidential victory, Zuckerberg and Trump’s relationship improved dramatically. Three weeks after the November 5th election, Zuckerberg traveled to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago private club to meet with the president-elect. On January 7th, Zuckerberg announced the end of Meta’s fact-checking program.
“We're going to get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with community notes similar to X,” said Zuckerberg. "We're going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies and restoring free expression on our platforms," he added, embodying the prioritization of free expression that Republicans have used to criticize online content moderation in the past.
Zuckerberg claimed that the independent fact-checkers who previously served as the backbone of Meta’s content moderation had “just been too politically biased,” a standpoint affirmed in a Threads post that declared Meta’s removal of content moderation rules around immigration and gender that are “out of touch with mainstream discourse,” according to The Wall Street Journal.
The CEO also referenced the fact that Meta’s large user base would mean that accidental and unnecessary censorship of a mere 1% of posts would censor millions of people, another motivation for the policy change.
Meta’s new content moderation rhetoric will affect Facebook and Instagram, two of the largest social media platforms in the world, each harnessing billions of users.
Gordon Pennycook, an associate psychology professor at Cornell University, is wary of Zuckerberg’s faith in community posts as a method of targeting misinformation. Having studied crowdsourced fact-checking, he told The Wall Street Journal that fact-checking methods are most successful when professional fact-checkers are given more resources, as opposed to being replaced.
In fact, Bloomberg editor Vlad Savov points out the dangers of leaving the moderation of the truth to the masses: “It should be unnecessary to point out that the reason we have moderation in the first place is to avoid online mobs promulgating their own versions of reality or bullying or excluding minorities…They’d [Meta and Zuckerberg] call it wisdom of the crowd; others might deem it mob rule.”
A 2023 ProPublica investigation contributed to concerns about the reliability of online users for fact checking; it determined that X’s Community Notes, which Zuckerberg plans to model Meta’s fact-checking after, has failed to manage misinformation surrounding the Israel-Hamas war on its platform.
When considering the change in Zuckerberg’s opinion over time, one can look to the influence of the Trump presidency and the trend of CEOs and business leaders altering their companies’ operations to please the president. Zuckerberg himself said, “The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards, once again, prioritizing speech.”
Further actions by Meta to curry favor with the Trump administration include its donation of $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund, naming former Republican lobbyist Joel Kaplan as Meta’s chief global affairs officer, and appointing Trump ally Dana White, the CEO of Ultimate Fighting Championship, to the Meta Board of Directors.
President Trump has expressed satisfaction with Meta’s chosen path, remarking in January that “they have come a long way.”
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