Meta’s choice to axe fact-checking a travesty

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This article was published 11/01/2025 (312 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Donald Trump has not yet been inaugurated into his second, non-consecutive term as U.S. president and some of the country’s most powerful moguls are already proving eager to please him.

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta — which operates the massive Facebook and Instagram social media platforms — announced Tuesday that the company is done with fact-checking. It will be replaced, Zuckerberg said, with a “community notes” system similar to that used on X, a platform owned by his social media rival Elon Musk, who is now part of Trump’s inner circle. The change is to be rolled out first in the U.S., and then to other countries after a fine-tuning process.

The company, which has often been accused of allowing disinformation to be sown freely on its platforms, has had an independent fact-checking process in place since 2016.

That may come as a surprise to some Facebook users who may have noticed the site has become mired in artificial-intelligence-generated nonsense. All the same, a fact-checking process to crack down on spreading misinformation was technically in place.

It is difficult to see Zuckerberg’s move as anything other than acquiescence to an incoming head of state whose supporters have long complained that social media platforms such as Facebook aren’t friendly enough to them. Supporting that notion is Meta’s statement that it will donate US$1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund.

“Fact-checkers have been too politically biased, and destroyed more trust than they’ve created,” Zuckerberg said in a video announcing the shift. He referred to the inevitability of disinformation flourishing on Meta platforms afterward as a “trade-off” of the decision.

It’s an astonishing bit of spin on the part of the Meta CEO. Another way to phrase the above statement is that fact-checks have a way of proving ridiculous claims to be untrue, which upsets people who seek to profit from the spread of that disinformation, thus creating a hassle for social media giants who are tired of being harangued by disinformation spreaders about how unfair all that scrutiny is to them.

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Meta employees have reportedly been grumbling in internal forums in disapproval of the shift. Presumably, people who have even the slightest interest in a version of Facebook that is not swamped with misinformation and other online dreck would prefer the platform keep its fact-checking system in place. The only people who stand to benefit from this change are, to put a fine point on it, liars. That Meta and its ownership would cower and cave in on this subject is nothing short of a travesty.

It is no secret by now that Trump and his supporters, be they inner-circle billionaires such as Musk, or ordinary citizens of MAGA America, frequently make far-out claims which are open to challenge, steamrolling the public discourse with mass-produced absurdities. It can admittedly be exhausting to keep picking them all apart. That does not, however, mean the work is not worth doing.

It is easy and self-serving to say that no one needs Meta or companies like it to do this work; there are many venerated, storied institutions in the media still dedicated to checking the facts and pushing back against lies, or half-truths, or outright propaganda.

And that’s all true.

But it is also a fact that millions of people spend millions of hours every day on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and X, and when the people running those platforms willingly surrender to waves of deceit, including some right from the White House, it’s going to be very bad for all of us.