Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg announced Tuesday morning that his social media company would stop using fact-checkers and instead embrace community notes, a feature popularized by Elon Musk’s X, to correct mistakes.
“We’re going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies, and restoring free expression on our platforms,” Zuckerberg said in a video posted to Facebook, the social media platform he founded in 2004. “More specifically, here’s what we’re going to do. First, we’re going to get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with community notes similar to X, starting in the U.S.”
Zuckerberg said Meta first enacted fact-checkers in 2016, after President-elect Donald Trump won his first term in the White House, because “the legacy media wrote nonstop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy.”
“We tried, in good faith, to address those concerns without becoming the arbiters of truth,” said Zuckerberg. “But the fact-checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created, especially in the U.S.”
The community notes-like feature Zuckerberg said his company would start using is a popular feature on X, initially developed as Birdwatch in 2021 to allow users to contribute fact-checks and corrections. The device was refined after Musk took over X in 2022, with the tech titan calling them a “game-changer for combating wrong information.”
Meta’s chief global affairs officer, Joel Kaplan, explained that the new feature would help eliminate fact checkers’ “political bias” by relying “on the community and the people on the platform to provide their own commentary to something that they’ve read” instead of “some so-called expert.”
“We think that’s a much better approach rather than relying on so-called experts who bring their own biases into the program,” Kaplan added during a Fox & Friends interview Tuesday morning. “It has become clear there is too much political bias in what they choose to fact-check because, basically, they get to fact-check whatever they see on the platform.”
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In addition, Meta’s trust, safety, and content moderation teams will be moved from California to Texas, following Musk’s lead with X.
“I think that will help us build trust to do this work in places where there is less concern about the bias of our teams,” Zuckerberg said.
The news came after Zuckerberg’s company faced critics who said “fact-checkers” suppressed free speech, censored information during the COVID-19 pandemic, and blacklisted information that could have hurt President Joe Biden’s chances of winning the 2020 election.
Zuckerberg himself blamed company fact-checkers for throttling vital information about the Hunter Biden laptop story in August 2022.
“If something is reported to us as potential misinformation, important misinformation, we use third-party fact-checking because we don’t want to be deciding what’s true and false,” he said at the time.
While Zuckerberg has attracted backlash from Republicans who argue he helped “rig” the 2020 election for Biden, the Meta founder made headlines for his recent overtures to Trump, most notably after their meeting at the president-elect’s Mar-a-Lago home.
Kaplan similarly sounded a conciliatory note toward the incoming Trump administration.
“We have a new administration coming in that is far from pressuring companies to censor and [is more] a huge supporter of free expression,” Kaplan said, adding that axing the fact-checkers for a community notes feature represents a “great opportunity for us to reset the balance in favor of free expression.”
Kaplan also said Meta is “excited” to collaborate with Trump to promote “American business and America’s technological edge.”
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“Those are issues of great importance to Meta and our sector,” Kaplan continued.
The announcement came after Zuckerberg appointed Dana White, the CEO of UFC and a huge Trump ally, to the board. White endorsed the president-elect during the 2024 campaign and spoke at his rally at Madison Square Garden in October 2024.