Meta announces a new, Trump-friendly fact-checking policy

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Mark Zuckerberg has a plan—a plan to please President-elect Donald Trump.

As Big Tech scrambles to placate Donald Trump before he reassumes office, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Tuesday that his company would replace their fact-checkers with user-generated Community Notes, beginning in the United States and then rolling out globally. Zuckerberg said in a video and in an announcement on Threads that the shift—largely the same system that Twitter/X uses—represented a return to the company’s roots and way of “restoring free speech.” He acknowledged, however, that the change “means that we’re going to catch less bad stuff,” adding, “but we’ll also reduce the number of innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally take down.”

Zuckerberg also gave Trump a specific shoutout in his Threads announcement, writing that the company will “work with President Trump to push back against foreign governments going after American companies to censor more.” Even as the incoming president and his allies threaten news outlets, the United States, Zuckerberg argued, “has the strongest constitutional protections for free expression in the world and the best way to defend against the trend of government overreach on censorship is with the support of the US government.”

The New York Times reported Tuesday that incoming Trump administration officials were given a heads-up about the new policies before they were announced. As they were being rolled out, Meta’s chief global affairs officer, Joel Kaplan, sat for an exclusive interview on Fox and Friends. Kaplan called the new setup “a great opportunity for us to reset the balance in favor of free expression.” The third-party fact-checking system, Kaplan told the beaming Fox hosts, “had too much political bias in what they choose to fact-check, and how.” Kaplan added that people want to “discuss and debate” topics like “ immigration, trans issues [and] gender.”

Zuckerberg’s announcement comes shortly after Meta announced that it would donate $1 million to Trump’s inaugural committee, part of a round of Big Tech companies who are doing the same.

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