Meta to End Fact-Checking Program in Shift Ahead of Trump Term
The social networking giant will stop using third-party fact-checkers on Facebook, Threads and Instagram and instead rely on users to add notes to posts. It is likely to please President-elect Trump and his allies.
Mike Isaac and Theodore Schleifer
Mike Isaac has covered Facebook and social media since 2010. Theodore Schleifer covers politics and Silicon Valley.
Meta said on Tuesday that it was ending its longstanding fact-checking program, a policy instituted to curtail the spread of misinformation across its social media apps, in a stark sign of how the company was repositioning itself for the Trump presidency and throwing its weight behind unfettered speech online.
Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, said it would now allow more speech, rely on its users to correct inaccurate and false posts, and take a more personalized approach to political content. It described the changes with the language of regret, saying it had strayed too far from its values over the previous decade.
“It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression,” Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, said in a video announcing the changes. The company’s fact-checking system, he added, had “reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship.”
Mr. Zuckerberg conceded there would be more “bad stuff” on the platforms as a result of the decision. “The reality is that this is a trade-off,” he said. “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.”
Ever since Donald J. Trump’s victory in November, few big companies have worked as overtly to curry favor with the president-elect, who, during his first administration, accused social media platforms of censoring conservative voices. In a series of announcements during this presidential transition period, Meta has sharply shifted its strategy in response to what Mr. Zuckerberg called a “cultural tipping point” from the election.
Mr. Zuckerberg dined with Mr. Trump at Mar-a-Lago in November and Meta later donated $1 million to support Mr. Trump’s inauguration. Last week, Mr. Zuckerberg elevated Joel Kaplan, the highest-ranking Meta executive closest to the Republican Party, to the company’s most senior policy role. And on Monday, Mr. Zuckerberg said Dana White, the head of the Ultimate Fighting Championship and an ally of Mr. Trump’s, would join Meta’s board.
Meta executives recently gave a heads-up to Trump officials about the change in policy, said a person with knowledge of the conversations who spoke on condition of anonymity. The fact-checking announcement coincided with an appearance by Mr. Kaplan on “Fox & Friends,” a favorite show of Mr. Trump’s, where Mr. Kaplan said there was “too much political bias” in Meta’s fact-checking program.
Mr. Trump said that he had watched Mr. Kaplan’s Fox interview and found it “impressive” and that Meta had “come a long way.” Mr. Trump also said Meta’s change was “probably” a result of the threats he had made against the company and Mr. Zuckerberg.
The influence of Elon Musk, the world’s richest man who leads X, SpaceX and Tesla, also loomed large over Meta’s shift. Since buying X in 2022, Mr. Musk has thrown out the platform’s restrictions on online speech and has turned to a program called Community Notes, which depends on X’s users to police false and misleading content. Mr. Musk, who has become a key adviser to Mr. Trump, also moved X to Texas and out of California, where it had been based, and has criticized California’s policies.
On Tuesday, Meta said it would also turn to a Community Notes program after seeing “this approach work on X.” In addition, Mr. Zuckerberg said his company would run its U.S. trust and safety and content moderation operations from Texas instead of California “to do this work in places where there’s less concern about the bias of our teams.”
In his Fox appearance on Tuesday, Mr. Kaplan pushed back against the idea that anyone was influencing Mr. Zuckerberg’s decisions.
“There’s no question that the things that happen at Meta are coming from Mark,” Mr. Kaplan said. But, he added, “I think Elon’s played an incredibly important role in moving the debate and getting people refocused on free expression.”
Misinformation researchers said Meta’s decision to end fact-checking was deeply concerning. Nicole Gill, a founder and the executive director of the digital watchdog organization Accountable Tech, said Mr. Zuckerberg was “reopening the floodgates to the exact same surge of hate, disinformation and conspiracy theories that caused Jan. 6 — and that continue to spur real-world violence.”
In 2021, Facebook shut down Mr. Trump’s account after the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol for inciting violence, before later reinstating him. Multiple studies have since shown that interventions like Facebook’s fact-checks were effective at reducing belief in falsehoods and reducing how often such content was shared.
But Meta’s move elated conservative allies of Mr. Trump, many of whom have disliked Meta’s practice of adding disclaimers or warnings to questionable or false posts. Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, said in a post on X that Meta “finally admits to censoring speech” and called the change “a huge win for free speech.”
Other Republicans were skeptical. Senator Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee, said in a post on X that Meta’s change was “a ploy to avoid being regulated.”
Inside Meta, Mr. Zuckerberg’s announcements were met by praise and horror. For some employees, Mr. Zuckerberg was finally being his “authentic self,” uninhibited by “woke” critics, three current and former employees said.
Others said Mr. Zuckerberg was throwing current and former employees under the bus despite their efforts on content moderation. As upset employees posted about the changes on internal message boards, human resources workers quickly removed the posts, the people said, saying they broke the rules of a company policy on community engagement. Meta put the policy in place in 2022 to keep contentious social issues out of the workplace.
Meta’s decision to move moderation teams from California to Texas to “eliminate bias” attracted particular internal attention, the people said. The company has long had workers on moderation topics in Texas, the people said. In private channels and group chats, others remarked on how it was fine to criticize Meta’s policy on free speech — unless you did it from inside the company.
Meta’s fact-checking policy was born out of Mr. Trump’s previous election win, in 2016. At the time, Facebook came under fire for the unchecked dissemination of misinformation across its network, including posts from foreign governments angling to sow discord among the American public.
After enormous public pressure, Mr. Zuckerberg turned to outside organizations like The Associated Press, ABC News and the fact-checking site Snopes, along with other global organizations vetted by the International Fact-Checking Network, to comb over potentially false or misleading posts on Facebook and Instagram and rule whether they needed to be annotated or removed.
The company spent the next eight years investing billions of dollars, thousands of people and devoting enormous technological resources to fixing content moderation issues. Mr. Zuckerberg tapped more than a dozen outside firms to help police posts, including an army of contractors from firms like Accenture to do much of the manual work of reviewing posts.
Mr. Zuckerberg also stressed the importance of artificial intelligence in handling many of these issues, given that nearly half the people on earth regularly post to one or more of Meta’s apps.
But over time, Mr. Zuckerberg grew frustrated with the lack of credit the company was given for trying to tamp down misinformation, two people close to the chief executive said. He felt that the time and effort Meta had put into the initiative was seeing diminishing returns, they said.
Mr. Zuckerberg expressed that frustration in a speech at Georgetown University in 2019, in which he said he did not want his social network to be “an arbiter of speech.” He said Facebook had been founded to give people a voice, and that critics who assailed the company for doing so were setting a dangerous example.
Mr. Zuckerberg also regretted the pressure that the Biden administration put on him to take down content related to Covid-19, a sentiment he relayed publicly in a letter to Congress last year. In the letter, Mr. Zuckerberg said the administration overreached in requests to take down content, “including humor and satire.” In hindsight, Meta should have pushed back more on the White House’s requests, he said.
By 2022, Meta had begun winnowing some of its content moderation and policy teams as part of widespread corporate cost cutting. The company continues to make strategic cuts on a rolling basis.
Among the changes announced on Tuesday were the removal of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender identity that Mr. Zuckerberg said were “out of touch with mainstream discourse.” Meta said it would begin phasing in more personalized political content, based on the signals people gave about what they were interested in seeing in their feeds.
Mr. Zuckerberg has evolved personally, too. In recent years, he has grown closer to Mr. White of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, and has immersed himself in the right-leaning environment of professional fighting. He has become tired of the constant attacks on him and his company and found dealing with Mr. Biden’s proactive approach to reining in the tech industry frustrating, two people familiar with his thinking said.
Above all else, the incoming Trump administration and its focus on free speech allows Meta to finally free itself from the Sisyphean task of monitoring the billions of posts that flow through its apps.
“We have a new administration coming in that is far from pressuring companies to censor and a huge supporter of free expression,” Mr. Kaplan said on Fox. “It gets us back to the values that Mark founded the company on.”
Kate Conger and Stuart A. Thompson contributed reporting.
Several of Meta’s third-party fact-checkers were caught off guard by the company’s announcement Tuesday morning after recent conversations with Meta officials about renewing their work for 2025.
A group of fact-checking organizations joined a conference call with each other to discuss the abrupt end to the program, which so far only impacts fact-checkers based in the United States, the company has said.
Alan Duke, editor in chief of Lead Stories, which has been fact-checking for Meta since early 2019, said Meta informed him via email on Tuesday morning that his contract with the company would be terminated around March 1.
The news was particularly surprising, he said, because he had signed a yearlong contract with Meta two weeks ago.
Meta’s third-party fact-checking effort paid fact-checking groups like FactCheck.org, PolitiFact and AFP Fact Check for each fact-check they published using Meta’s tools.
PolitiFact, for example, earned more than 5 percent of its revenue from the fact-checking partnership, according to the group’s disclosures.
Lead Stories employs about 80 people worldwide, most of whom fact check in languages other than English, including Hungarian, Korean, Spanish and Ukrainian. While Meta was once the company’s primary client, Mr. Duke said the company now does more work for ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok.
All of Meta’s 10 fact-checking partners are expected to lose that funding, but they were still sorting what that meant for their future.
“It’s a good mission that we’re starting to see come to an end,” said Neil Brown, president of the Poynter Institute, a nonprofit that runs PolitiFact.
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In November 2016, as Facebook was being blamed for a torrent of fake news and conspiracy theories swirling around the first election of Donald J. Trump, Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of the social network, wrote an apologetic post.
In his message, Mr. Zuckerberg announced a series of steps he planned to take to grapple with false and misleading information on Facebook, such as working with fact-checkers.
“The bottom line is: we take misinformation seriously,” he wrote in a personal Facebook post. “There are many respected fact checking organizations,” he added, “and, while we have reached out to some, we plan to learn from many more.”
Eight years later, Mr. Zuckerberg is no longer apologizing. On Tuesday, he announced that Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Threads, was ending its fact-checking program and getting back to its roots around free expression. The fact-checking system had led to “too much censorship,” he said.
It was the latest step in a transformation of Mr. Zuckerberg. In recent years, the chief executive, now 40, has stepped away from his mea culpa approach to problems on his social platforms. Fed up with what has seemed at times to be unceasing criticism of his company, he has told executives close to him that he wants to return to his original thinking on free speech, which involves a lighter hand in content moderation.
Mr. Zuckerberg has remolded Meta as he has made the shift. Gone is the CrowdTangle transparency tool, which allowed researchers, academics and journalists to monitor conspiracy theories and misinformation on Facebook. The company’s election integrity team, once trumpeted as a group of experts focused solely on issues around the vote, has been folded into a general integrity team.
Instead, Mr. Zuckerberg has promoted technology efforts at Meta, including its investments in the immersive world of the so-called metaverse and its focus on artificial intelligence.
Mr. Zuckerberg’s change has been visible on his social media. Photos of him uncomfortably clad in a suit and tie and testifying before Congress have been replaced by videos of him with longer hair and in gold chains, competing in extreme sports and sometimes hunting for his own food. Long, heavily lawyered Facebook posts about Meta’s commitment to democracy no longer appear. Instead, he has posted quips on Threads responding to celebrity athletes and videos showing the company’s newest A.I. initiatives.
“This shows how Mark Zuckerberg is feeling that society is more accepting of those libertarian and right-leaning viewpoints that he’s always had,” said Katie Harbath, chief executive of Anchor Change, a tech consulting firm, who previously worked at Facebook. “This is an evolved return to his political origins.”
Mr. Zuckerberg has long been a pragmatist who has gone where the political winds have blown. He has flip-flopped on how much political content should be shown to Facebook and Instagram users, previously saying social networks should be about fun, relatable content from family and friends but then on Tuesday saying Meta would show more personalized political content.
Mr. Zuckerberg has told executives close to him that he is comfortable with the new direction of his company. He sees his most recent steps as a return to his original thinking on free speech and free expression, with Meta limiting its monitoring and controlling of content, said two Meta executives who spoke with Mr. Zuckerberg in the last week.
Mr. Zuckerberg was never comfortable with the involvement of outside fact-checkers, academics or researchers in his company, one of the executives said. He now sees many of the steps taken after the 2016 election as a mistake, the two executives said.
“Fact-checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created,” Mr. Zuckerberg said in a video on Tuesday about the end of the fact-checking program, echoing statements made by top Republicans over the years.
Meta declined to comment.
Those who have known Mr. Zuckerberg for decades describe him as a natural libertarian, who enjoyed reading books extolling free expression and the free market system after he dropped out of Harvard to start Facebook in 2004. As his company grew, so did pressure to become more responsive to complaints from world leaders and civil society groups that he was not doing enough to moderate content on his platform.
Crises including a genocide in Myanmar, in which Facebook was blamed for allowing hate speech to spread against the Muslim Rohingya people, forced Mr. Zuckerberg to expand moderation teams and define rules around speech on his social networks.
He was coached by people close to him, including Meta’s former chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, to become more involved in politics. After the 2016 election, Mr. Zuckerberg embarked on a public campaign to clear his name and redeem his company. He held regular meetings with civic leaders and invited politicians to visit his company’s headquarters, rolled out transparency tools such as CrowdTangle and brought on fact-checkers.
In 2017, he announced that he was conducting a “listening tour” across the United States to “get a broader perspective” on how Americans used Facebook. The campaign-like photo opportunities with farmers and autoworkers led to speculation that he was running for political office.
Despite his efforts, Mr. Zuckerberg continued to be blamed for the misinformation and falsehoods that spread on Facebook and Instagram.
In October 2019, Mr. Zuckerberg began to push back. In an address at Georgetown University, he said Facebook had been founded to give people a voice.
“I’m here today because I believe we must continue to stand for free expression,” he said.
In 2021, when the Jan. 6 riot broke out at the U.S. Capitol after the presidential election, Meta was again held responsible for hosting speech that fomented the violence. Two weeks later, Mr. Zuckerberg told investors that the company was “considering steps” to reduce political content across Facebook.
His evolution since then has been steady. Executives who pushed Mr. Zuckerberg to involve himself directly in politics, including Ms. Sandberg, have left the company. Those closest to him now cheer his focus on his own interests, which include extreme sports and rapping for his wife, as well as promoting his company’s A.I. initiatives.
In a podcast interview in San Francisco that Mr. Zuckerberg recorded live in front of an audience of 6,000 in September, he spoke for nearly 90 minutes about his love of technology. He said he should have rejected accusations that his company was responsible for societal ills.
“I think that the political miscalculation was a 20-year mistake,” he said. He added that it could take another decade for him to move his company’s brand back to where he wanted it.
“We’ll get through it, and we’ll come out stronger,” Mr. Zuckerberg said.
For years, social media companies made it a top priority to combat hate speech. But in recent months, they have waffled over how to tackle hateful online commentary, particularly when it is directed at L.G.B.T.Q. communities.
Meta on Tuesday said it would drop some of its rules protecting L.G.B.T.Q. people. The changes included allowing users to share “allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality.”
The social media company, which owns Facebook and Instagram, will “get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse,” Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive of Meta, said in a video.
The change comes amid broad political debate over transgender rights. At least 26 states have restricted gender-affirming care for minors, according to a tally by The New York Times. Tech companies have also faced years of criticism from conservatives, accusing the platforms of promoting liberal voices and stifling dissent.
The changes to Meta’s content policy follow similar ones at X, which recently rolled back rules against hate speech targeting transgender people and made the use of “cisgender” — a word used to describe people who identify with the gender they were assigned at birth — a slur.
Meta will refocus its content moderation efforts on “illegal and high-severity violations,” its new global policy chief, Joel Kaplan, said in a blog post.
“It’s not right that things can be said on TV or the floor of Congress, but not on our platforms,” Mr. Kaplan added.
Cecilia Kang contributed reporting.
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While Republicans largely cheered Meta’s announcement on Tuesday that it would effectively end its fact-checking program, several tech watchdog groups condemned the decision, warning of the potential for a surge in disinformation.
Nicole Gill, executive director of Accountable Tech, said in a statement that the decision was “a gift to Donald Trump and extremists around the world.” Meta, she cautioned, was inviting “the exact same surge of hate, disinformation and conspiracy theories” that fueled the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
Nora Benavidez, senior counsel at the advocacy group Free Press, said in a statement that Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, was “saying yes to more lies, yes to more harassment, yes to more hate.”
“While Zuckerberg characterized the platform giant’s new approach as a defense of free speech, its real intentions are twofold: Ditch the technology company’s responsibility to protect the health and safety of its users, and align the company more closely with an incoming president who’s a known enemy of accountability,” Ms. Benavidez said.
Valerie Wirtschafter, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, said that Meta should have continued to build on its fact-checking resources, adding crowdsourced content to existing practices. As they stand, Meta’s changes are “likely to make the information environment worse,” she said.
But Meta’s announcement was greeted with open arms by President-elect Donald J. Trump, who has long claimed that the feature unfairly treated posts by conservative users.
In an unrelated news conference at Mar-a-Lago on Tuesday, Mr. Trump said that Meta had “come a long way,” conceding that the change was “probably” in response to threats that he has made against the company and Mr. Zuckerberg. A chorus of Republican lawmakers, who have echoed Mr. Trump’s claims about censorship of conservative viewpoints, chimed in to praise the move.
Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky called it “a huge win for free speech” in a post on X. Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio called Meta’s decision “a huge step in the right direction.”
At least one Republican lawmaker voiced skepticism of Meta’s decision. Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee said in a post on X that Meta’s change was “a ploy to avoid being regulated,” though she, too, repeated the claim that Meta has censored conservatives.
In 2016, Mark Zuckerberg announced that he was instituting a fact-checking program across Facebook and Instagram after being accused of disseminating misinformation. Eight years later, Mr. Zuckerberg has done an about-face, ending the program and characterizing it as a gross overcorrection.
It may seem like whiplash. But it is far from the first time that Meta’s chief executive has shifted his stance based on where the political winds are blowing.
In January 2021, Mr. Zuckerberg banned Mr. Trump from posting on Meta’s apps two days after the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol. At the time, Mr. Zuckerberg said the “risks” of allowing Mr. Trump — who had urged his followers to take action after losing to the Democratic challenger, Joseph R. Biden, in the presidential election — to continue posting to Facebook and Instagram were “simply too great.”
Less than four years later, Meta rolled back those restrictions and reinstated Mr. Trump, saying it was important for the American public to hear from both Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump in the run-up to the 2024 election. Meta also said that the restrictions on Mr. Trump’s account in 2016 were a result of “extraordinary circumstances.”
Mr. Zuckerberg has flip-flopped on political content as well. Last year, Meta trotted out its top executives to defend a policy of downplaying speech on political or social issues across its apps. At the time, Mr. Zuckerberg and his allies didn’t want to see such content online, instead opting to have more fun or personal connections on social media.
But on Tuesday, Mr. Zuckerberg announced an abrupt end to that policy as well. He said people actually do want political speech across Meta’s apps, and that censoring some of those topics was “out of touch with mainstream discourse.”
Mr. Zuckerberg maintained that his position was consistent with past beliefs he professed in public, including a speech at Georgetown University in 2019 in which he defended the company’s policy of not wanting his social network to be “an arbiter of speech.”
While Mr. Zuckerberg may believe in that principle, he has shifted the ways Meta’s policy teams have applied it over the course of the Biden and Trump administrations. Under President Biden, Mr. Zuckerberg was more willing to take down certain forms of content specifically around Covid-19, a move he said he later regretted making.
On Tuesday, Mr. Zuckerberg said Meta was looking forward to “going back to its roots” on free speech, and that working with the Trump administration would help them to do that more effectively.
At least until the next president takes office in 2028.
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Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, blamed the company’s fact-checking partners for some of Facebook’s moderation issues, saying in a video that “fact-checkers have been too politically biased” and have “destroyed more trust than they created.”
Fact-checking groups that worked with Meta have taken issue with that characterization, saying they had no role in deciding what the company did with the content that was fact-checked.
“I don’t believe we were doing anything, in any form, with bias,” said Neil Brown, the president of the Poynter Institute, a global nonprofit that runs PolitiFact, one of Meta’s fact-checking partners. “There’s a mountain of what could be checked, and we were grabbing what we could.”
Mr. Brown said the group used Meta’s tools to submit fact-checks and followed Meta’s rules that prevented the group from fact-checking politicians. Meta ultimately decided how to respond to the fact-checks, adding warning labels, limiting the reach of some content or even removing the posts.
“We did not, and could not, remove content,” wrote Lori Robertson, the managing editor of FactCheck.org, which has partnered with Meta since 2016, in a blog post. “Any decisions to do that were Meta’s.”
Meta is shifting instead to a program it’s calling Community Notes, which will see it rely on its own users to write fact-checks instead of third-party organizations. Researchers have found the program can be effective when paired with other moderation strategies.
Several digital rights groups are condemning Meta’s reversal of its fact-checking program. Nicole Gill, executive director of Accountable Tech, said in a statement that the decision is “a gift to Donald Trump and extremists around the world.” Nora Benavidez, senior counsel at advocacy group Free Press, said in a statement that Zuckerberg is “saying yes to more lies, yes to more harassment, yes to more hate.”
The Community Notes program from X requires consensus from users with varying perspectives before a fact-check is published. But researchers have found that, as Americans become increasingly polarized, few fact-checks see the light of day. According to Mediawise, a media literacy program at the Poynter Institute, less than 10 percent of Community Notes drafted by X users end up getting published on the platform.
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Meta is changing the way it moderates content on its site amid heightened U.S. regulatory scrutiny.
The Federal Trade Commission has sued Meta, accusing the company of breaking antitrust laws when it acquired both Instagram and WhatsApp. That trial is slated to start in April. Meta also faces suits by dozens of state attorneys general over child safety and privacy violations.
Republicans have also harshly criticized Meta’s policies on removing content they say amounts to censorship of conservative voices and have held hearings on Capitol Hill grilling Mark Zuckerberg and other executives. And in recent weeks, President-elect Donald J. Trump has selected new leaders of the F.T.C. and Federal Communications Commission who have vowed to crack down on the power of the biggest tech companies and to punish them for stifling speech.
Since Mr. Trump’s election, Mr. Zuckerberg has made several overt attempts to win over the incoming administration, meeting with the president-elect, publicly congratulated his victory and donating $1 million to his inauguration.
But some Republicans shared skeptical reactions to Meta’s decision to delegate fact-checking posts to its users.
“Now that President Trump is about to take office, Meta has allegedly decided to stop censoring conservatives,” Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., posted on X. “This is a ploy to avoid being regulated. We will not be fooled.”
Mr. Trump during a news conference on Tuesday said he was impressed by the decision but conceded that the change was “probably” because of threats he’s made against the company and Zuckerberg.
The F.T.C. didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. Meta declined to comment.
Meta has been caught up in a larger effort by U.S. regulators to crack down on the power of the biggest tech companies in the internet era. The F.T.C. and the Department of Justice have also sued Apple, Google and Amazon over monopolistic practices.
The April trial against Meta will help determine the company’s fate as the world’s biggest social media juggernaut.
The lawsuit was originally filed during the Trump administration, although it’s unclear how much support Andrew Ferguson, Mr. Trump’s pick to lead the F.T.C., might lend to its continuing prosecution. The F.T.C. under Democratic chair Lina Khan, brought a revised version of its lawsuit against Meta in January 2022.
The F.T.C. has said the company’s purchases of Instagram in 2012 for $1 billion and WhatsApp in 2014 for nearly $19 billion were intended to destroy competition and create a social media monopoly. In the suit, the F.T.C. said the company abused its monopoly position through a “buy or bury” acquisition strategy.
Judge James Boasberg of U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia said the case will likely last about eight weeks but could go longer. Mr. Zuckerberg is expected to be among witnesses to appear during the trial.
The F.T.C.’s case against Meta may be harder to win than other cases of tech monopolization, legal experts say. It focuses on acquisitions that are more than a decade old and are hard to review in retrospect for antitrust violations. The F.T.C. also allowed the mergers to proceed when the deals were first announced.
Trump was asked about Meta’s announcement at an unrelated news conference he was hosting at Mar-a-Lago. Trump said he watched Joel Kaplan’s interview on Fox and found it “impressive,” adding that the company had “come a long way.” A beat later, though, Trump conceded that the change was “probably” due to threats that he has made against the company and its leader, Mark Zuckerberg.
President-elect Donald J. Trump, reacting to Meta’s fact-checking decision, told Fox News that the company has “come a long way.” And while some Republican lawmakers, including Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, have praised the move, a least one has been skeptical. Senator Marsha Blackburn, a Republican from Tennessee, said in a post on X that Meta’s change was “a ploy to avoid being regulated.”
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Meta is joining Elon Musk’s X in moving some operations to Texas.
Going forward, the social media company will run its U.S. content review operations out of the Lone Star State, its chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, said on Tuesday. He also said that Meta will move its teams that focus on trust and safety and content moderation out of California, where the company is based.
The move “will help us build trust to do this work in places where there’s less concern about the bias of our teams,” Mr. Zuckerberg said.
The move echoes Elon Musk’s decision last year to move the headquarters of X, his social media platform, from California to Texas and close its main San Francisco office. At the time, Mr. Musk blamed a California law that barred school districts from requiring teachers to notify parents if their children change their gender identification.
Meta, which is headquartered in Silicon Valley’s Menlo Park, has faced years of criticism from Republicans over a perceived liberal work force and claims of censoring conservative voices. Picks to lead major regulatory agencies in the new Trump administration have vowed to go after social media companies.
Meta has had a presence for years in Austin, Texas, one of the more liberal cities in the state. The company also has a data center in Fort Worth, Texas. A Meta spokesman, Andy Stone, declined to provide details on how many roles the company planned to move out of California.
Texas has in recent years positioned itself as a hub for the tech industry. Still,state lawmakers in 2021 passed a law that barred social media companies like Meta from taking down political viewpoints. The law has been challenged by tech industry groups.
The Supreme Court returned the issue to a lower court last year.
Joel Kaplan, Meta’s new chief global affairs officer, credited Elon Musk’s influence during an interview this morning on Fox & Friends. “I think Elon’s played an incredibly important role in moving the debate and getting people refocused on free expression,” Kaplan said.
Joel Kaplan, Meta’s new chief global affairs officer, played a leading role in Tuesday’s content moderation announcement.
In an exclusive interview on “Fox and Friends,” Mr. Kaplan said the company’s previous fact-checking system became too biased and the company wanted to return to its roots of more unfettered speech. He pointed to Elon Musk’s X, which has few rules and allows users to moderate each other, as a good model.
“This is a great opportunity for us to reset the balance in favor of free expression,” Mr. Kaplan said in the interview.
It was a striking debut by the longtime Republican lobbyist for Meta, who was named to the top policy role last week. Mr. Kaplan, 55, has close ties in the Trump administration and his promotion was seen as the company’s attempt to best position itself for the incoming president.
Mr. Kaplan replaced Nick Clegg, a former deputy prime minister of Britain who had handled policy and regulatory issues globally for Meta since 2018.
Mr. Kaplan graduated from Harvard Law School and then clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court. He later served as then-President George W. Bush’s deputy chief of staff from 2006 to 2009. He joined Meta as vice president of U.S. policy in 2011, when the company was called Facebook.
At the time, Mr. Zuckerberg was largely disinterested in politics and the company was booming in popularity. Mr. Kaplan grew the company’s Washington lobbying and policy organization, which now regularly ranks among the top spenders in lobbying Congress and the White House.
During the first Trump administration, Mr. Kaplan became a confidant of Mr. Zuckerberg’s, pushing the chief executive to engage with Mr. Trump, who had accused the company of censorship. Mr. Kaplan also fought to allay anger by Republican lawmakers who viewed Facebook’s top leaders as politically biased in favor of Democrats.
Mr. Kaplan’s push for more engagement with Mr. Trump and other Republicans angered some of the company’s employees. Many employees blasted Mr. Kaplan’s appearance at the 2018 confirmation hearing of his friend, Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who was accused of sexual assault. Mr. Kavanaugh has denied the allegations.
But Mr. Kaplan’s strong Republican ties are now viewed as important as Meta prepares for a second Trump term. Last month, Mr. Kaplan posted a photo with Vice- President-elect JD Vance at the New York Stock Exchange.
In the Fox interview, Mr. Kaplan said Mr. Zuckerberg made the decision to end fact-checking. He also criticized President Biden’s pressure on U.S. companies to moderate content.
“One of the things we’ve experienced is that when you have a U.S. president, administration, that is pushing for censorship, it just makes it open season for other governments around the world that don’t even have the protections of the First Amendment to really put pressure on U.S. companies,” Mr. Kaplan said in the interview. “We’re going to work with President Trump to push back on that kind of thing around the world.”
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Social media companies are increasingly relying on fact-checks written by their users, allowing companies to step back from politically loaded decisions about what content to take down.
Elon Musk’s X, which stopped using employees to fact-check posts, relies heavily on its users to police its site for misinformation in a program called Community Notes. YouTube has also begun testing a similar feature, although it uses third-party evaluators to determine whether the corrective notes are helpful.
The decisions to move away from strict rules about what is allowed on the sites and employing thousands of content moderators to police them follows yearslong complaints from Republicans that social media companies effectively censored conservative voices. And, despite the companies’ moderation efforts, many social media researchers still found myriad posts containing rule-breaking content.
X’s Community Notes began before Mr. Musk acquired the company in 2022. But Mr. Musk aggressively accelerated the program and largely did away with the fact-checking labels the company had once applied to misleading posts about hot-button issues like elections and the Covid-19 pandemic.
Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, nodded to X’s influence in his announcement. “We’re going to get rid of fact checkers and replace them with Community Notes similar to X, starting in the U.S.,” Mr. Zuckerberg said.
Mr. Musk, responding in a post on X on Tuesday, said, “This is cool.”
Community Notes allows users who participate in the program to write fact-checks for any post on X. The approach works for topics on which there is broad consensus, researchers have found. But users with differing political viewpoints have to agree on a fact-check before it is publicly appended to a post, which means that misleading posts about politically divisive subjects often go unchecked.
MediaWise, a media literacy program at the Poynter Institute, found in July that only about 6 percent of the drafted Community Notes on posts about immigration became public, and only 4 percent of drafted fact-checks on posts about abortion were published.
The program has also added fact-checking labels to X posts that turned out to be accurate. During hurricane season, Community Notes participants incorrectly labeled storm forecasts as inaccurate.
Keith Coleman, a vice president of product at X who oversees the Community Notes program, said in a recent interview with Asterisk Magazine that social media users distrusted companies’ fact-checking.
“A lot of people just did not want a tech or media company deciding what was or was not misleading,” Mr. Coleman said. “So even if you could put labels on content, if people think it’s biased, they’re not likely to be very informed by it.”