PANTS ON FIRE — It’s the end of an era for professional fact checking. Mark Zuckerberg announced today that Meta would be changing its policy surrounding combating misinformation — adopting a much higher standard for removing content, ending the tech giant’s third-party fact checking program and relying instead on a community note system similar to the social media platform X. The move had the tenor and telltale signs of genuflecting before the new governing majority in Washington. “The fact checkers have just been too politically biased, and they’ve destroyed more trust than they’ve created, especially in the U.S.,” said Zuckerberg in a video statement, echoing long standing Republican complaints about the fact checking industry. In his five-minute address this morning, the billionaire co-founder of Meta explicitly noted that he would work with the Trump administration to combat stronger misinformation and censorship laws around the world. But he also used the opportunity to signal to Washington that Meta recognizes there’s a new sheriff in town. In a not-so-subtle dig at the outgoing Biden administration, Zuckerberg argued that Meta’s efforts to counter the global trend toward misinformation and restrictions on speech “[has] been so difficult over the past four years when even the U.S. government has pushed for censorship.” He spoke of being in “a new era now” and nodded to themes only recently litigated on the campaign trail. “[We’re] going to get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse. What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas. And it’s gone too far,” Zuckerberg said. And that wasn’t all. He pointedly announced Meta would move its content moderation teams from California to Texas — the proxies for the blue state-red state ideological divide — where he argued “there’s less concern about the bias of our teams.” But Meta’s decision to ditch professional fact checking organizations and scale back its content moderation isn’t simply about power politics. It’s the result of a much broader cultural shift in the tech world that preceded Trump’s victory. Disinformation reporting and broader moderation is out of vogue in America, dismissed as another form of censorship by elites and an enemy to free speech. In the immediate aftermath of Donald Trump’s first victory in 2016, the fact checking industry entered a boom time. Outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post hired dedicated fact checkers — and the Times’ public editor (another relic of the past) noted that the organization was late to the fact checking business . Facebook, in the aftermath of misinformation on its platform during the 2016 election and the ultimate Cambridge Analytica scandal , created the third party fact checking program that the company just disbanded, relying on sites like Snopes and PolitiFact to add context to their posts. Those same sites, around since well before the Trump era, saw an explosion in traffic back then. In response, conservatives — and ardent Trump supporters in particular — groused increasingly loudly about the partisan lean of fact checkers and a new class of “misinformation reporters.” Those frustrations went nuclear after Facebook and Twitter removed information about Hunter Biden’s laptop — much of which turned out to be correct — in the direct leadup to the 2020 election and after the Biden administration announced a short-lived “Disinformation Governance Board” in 2022 that commentators on the right and on the left painted as an Orwellian organ meant to regulate speech. After Trump proved his political staying power even after he himself was banned from Facebook and Twitter following the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, the idea that he won the first time because of pervasive misinformation started to look increasingly specious. While “checking facts” sounds like a straightforward endeavor, the truth is that broader content decisions based on fact checking are always politically charged. As such, almost no one was completely happy with how social media platforms, in particular, handled fact checking. Liberals believed the Trump administration was consistently getting away with blatant lies, conservatives were convinced that all fact checkers were hopelessly biased, and even those who were further left or right complained of random, unfair censorship of their views. Consequently, X and now Meta have insisted that they are returning power to the people. Fewer posts will be flagged or deleted. Political opinions of all sorts will be welcome. If they include incorrect facts, other users can self-police, the thinking goes. Only it’s not so simple. Deleting fewer posts and banning fewer accounts might help social media companies argue that they’re re-committing to free speech, but as POLITICO’s Digital Future Daily pointed out today , they’re still operating with complex, shadowy algorithms that prioritize certain kinds of content over others. The presence or absence of Censorship has little to do with what people are actually seeing when they log onto Facebook, where the algorithm remains king. Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@politico.com . Or contact tonight’s author at cmchugh@politico.com or on X (formerly known as Twitter) at @calder_mchugh .
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