Meta, the company that owns Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Threads, announced that it will end partnerships with fact-checking organizations and start “lifting restrictions on some topics.” Get ready for more awful and fake Facebook posts.
Meta said in a blog post today, “We will end the current third party fact checking program in the United States and instead begin moving to a Community Notes program. We’ve seen this approach work on X – where they empower their community to decide when posts are potentially misleading and need more context, and people across a diverse range of perspectives decide what sort of context is helpful for other users to see.”
Instead of employing third-party fact check agencies to evaluate trending posts, Meta is now duplicating the Community Notes feature used on Twitter/X, which shifts responsibility for policing content to the platform users. Community Notes have not been an effective method for combating misinformation on Twitter/X, and sometimes just creates another war in the list of proposed community notes with users brigading some answers.
There’s a clear reason for this change: Donald Trump is about to be sworn in for his second term as President of the United States, and Trump has often criticized Meta and other social media companies for alleged “censorship.” Facebook banned Trump in January 2021 over public safety concerns, after his supporters attacked the United States Capitol, stating that he was being censored.
Meta restored Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts in February 2023. In recent months, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other executives have publicly appealed to Trump and right-wing users—Trump previously said Zuckerberg “will spend the rest of his life in prison” if he did “anything illegal” during the 2024 presidential election. Zuckerberg later made a personal $1 million donation to Trump’s inauguration fund, alongside other tech CEOs like OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Apple’s Tim Cook.
Meta’s blog post also explained, “We’re getting rid of a number of restrictions on topics like immigration, gender identity and gender that are the subject of frequent political discourse and debate.” The latter category is referring to Meta’s policies that banned hate speech towards LGBTQ+ individuals.
To be clear, there’s not a “frequent political discourse and debate” about gender in the United States except hate speech and escalating anti-trans legislation across the country. Trump is seeking a total ban on the recognition of transgender individuals in the US. Twitter/X, which Meta is using as a model for its new moderation policy, considers “cis” and “cisgender” as slurs that can get accounts suspended. Cisgender is a common term for someone who identifies with the gender they were assigned at birth, and it has no inherently negative connotation.
This policy shift is a transparent attempt to appeal to the incoming US administration and ring-wing users, and it will result in more dangerous speech and organized violence against LGTBQ+ individuals, whistleblowers, activists, and other people. Without effective moderation and fact checking, Facebook and Instagram’s rampant fake news problem will become worse. This is also happening at the same time as Meta experiments with AI character profiles in an attempt to boost engagement, and AI-generated slop remains widespread on Facebook and Instagram.
One thing is clear: Facebook and Instagram are about to get a lot, lot worse. Now is as great a time as ever to check out Bluesky and Mastodon.