Apparently, fact-checking is now too political for Facebook

Meta and Mark Zuckerberg’s appeasement of the incoming president continues this morning. Last month, the tech mogul donated $1 million to Donald Trump’s inauguration fund. This morning, he’s giving him a policy gift (no, not that one) with the removal of Facebook and Instagram’s fact checkers, explaining that those fact checkers were biased and that things are just different now—or at least they will be on January 20.

“It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression on Facebook and Instagram,” Zuckerberg says in a video posted to Facebook this morning. Framing the issue as a debate from “the last several years,” Zuckerberg continues, “Governments and legacy media have pushed to censor more and more. A lot of this is clearly political.” Zuckerberg says there is other “legitimately bad stuff out there” like “drugs, terrorism, child exploitation” that needs to be moderated out, but that the systems they have in place make too many mistakes and end up censoring people who don’t deserve it. “The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point to once again prioritizing speech,” he says, vowing to “restore free expression.” 

The Facebook founder claims that while they tried to address the misinformation problem that “legacy media” kept harping on during the first Trump administration, the fact checkers were politically biased and thus the juice just wasn’t worth the squeeze. Now, Facebook and Instagram will instead switch to a style similar to Twitter/X (things are going great over there) where people can add context to false or misleading posts via Community Notes. Zuckerberg goes on to say they’re simplifying rules on topics like, say, “immigration and gender” because the existing policies are “just out of touch with mainstream discourse.” The efforts to be inclusive, he says, have only shut out people “with different ideas” and “it’s gone too far.” (All the way to the White House!) 

Of course, while Zuckerberg, who looks increasingly like a Paul brother, stops short of using a term like “political correctness” it’s clear from the video that there is a political agenda at play. Weeding out one political belief does not make a system apolitical; it just makes it political in a different way. And like Elon Musk before him, Zuckerberg is moving his content moderation teams from California to Texas, opining it’s helpful to do this in a place where “there is less concern about the bias of our teams.” Zuckerberg’s final point is that he plans to work with President Trump to fight other world leaders who want to censor Americans, at one point (hilariously) saying that Europe’s laws around censorship make it “difficult to build anything innovative there.” And the country of China had the gall to block Facebook, which Zuckerberg seems to take offense to. Facebook was never apolitical—there’s a strong argument to be made that they significantly helped Trump win the first time—but Zuck is right about one thing. This certainly feels like a new era.