Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, has announced it is ending its fact-checking program meant to stop the spread of misinformation on those platforms and will instead rely on a protocol similar to X’s Community Notes.
The demise of truth. Meta will end fact-checking: www.nytimes.com/live/2025/01… [image or embed]
— Frank Figliuzzi (@frankfigliuzzi.bsky.social) January 7, 2025 at 6:41 AM
From the New York Times:
The reversal of the years-old policy is a stark sign of how the company is repositioning itself for the Trump presidency in the weeks before it begins.
Meta described the changes with the language of a mea culpa: Joel Kaplan, Meta’s newly installed global policy chief, said in a statement that the company wanted to “undo the mission creep that has made our rules too restrictive and too prone to over-enforcement.”
Meta’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, said in a video that the new protocol, which will begin in the United States in the coming months, is similar to the one used by X, called Community Notes.
“It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression,” Mr. Zuckerberg said. The company’s current fact-checking system, he added, had “reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship.”
In his video announcement Zuckerberg admits “The reality is that this is a trade-off. It means that we’re going to catch less bad stuff, but we’ll also reduce the number of innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally take down.”
Meta went to Fox News to announce it’s ending its third-party fact checking program. Zuck isn’t just kissing the ring, he’s slobbering all over it. about.fb.com/news/2025/01… [image or embed]
— Oliver Darcy (@oliverdarcy.bsky.social) January 7, 2025 at 4:31 AM
Discover more from The Randy Report
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.