Meta Scraps Third-Party Fact-Checking For X-like Community Notes. Some Claim It’s Gone ‘Full MAGA’ 

In a move seen by some as an olive branch to President-elect Donald Trump, Meta said Tuesday that it will scrap the third-party fact-checking program that has been in place since 2016 in the U.S. in favor of a Community Notes initiative, resembling that used on X (formerly Twitter).

Joel Kaplan—who was promoted to chief global affairs officer, the company’s most senior policy role, last week, replacing the outgoing Nick Clegg—said in a blog post that the aim is to provide context from “people across a diverse range of perspectives.” Community Notes will be written and rated by contributing users, with Meta having no part in the process or in determining which ones appear. The blog post detailed other changes that were made to how the platform handles high and low severity violations.

“The reality is, this is a tradeoff,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in an accompanying video. “It means that we’re going to catch less bad stuff, but we’ll also reduce the number of innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally take down.”

“I think it’s safe to say no one predicted that Elon Musk’s chaotic takeover of Twitter would become a trend that other tech platforms would follow, and yet here we are,” Damian Rollison, director of market insights at artificial intelligence platform SOCi, told ADWEEK. “We can see now in retrospect that Musk established a standard for a newly conservative approach to the loosening of online content moderation—one that Meta has now embraced in advance of the incoming Trump administration.”

Meta is also removing restrictions on civic content in topics like gender, gender identity, and immigration across Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, as well as throttling back changes the company introduced in 2021 to reduce the amount of political content users see.

The Trump effect

Reactions across the industry tie Meta’s policy change directly to Trump’s election victory.

Journalist, podcast host, and political commentator Saagar Enjeti said of Zuckerberg’s video, “I highly recommend that you watch all of it, as tonally, it is one of the biggest indications of ‘elections have consequences’ I have ever seen.”

“The move will elate conservatives, who have often criticized Meta for censoring speech, but it will spook many liberals and advertisers, showing just how far Zuckerberg is willing to go to win Trump’s approval,” Emarketer principal analyst Jasmine Enberg said in an email.

The shift started nearly one full year before the vote, with Meta reversing its ban on ads questioning the legitimacy of the 2020 U.S. presidential election, in which current President Joe Biden held off Trump’s bid for a second term.

Kaplan debuted Zuckerberg’s video in an appearance on Fox News’ Fox & Friends, The New York Times reported, adding that officials in the incoming administration were alerted about the changes before Tuesday’s announcement.

In the weeks since Trump’s victory, Zuckerberg has met with Trump and potential secretary of state appointee Marco Rubio at the president-elect’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Fla.; donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund; promoted Republican Party ally Kaplan; and added Trump ally Dana White, CEO of UFC, to the company’s board of directors.

The Real Facebook Oversight Board, an accountability organization not affiliated with the company, said the changes announced Tuesday represent Meta going “full MAGA” and “political pandering,” adding in a statement, “Meta’s announcement today is a retreat from any sane and safe approach to content moderation.”

Too many mistakes

However, Kaplan maintained that the motivation behind the move was cutting back on mistakes when content is erroneously removed, or when users find themselves in “Facebook jail” with little recourse and slow response times. Kaplan noted that while Meta removed “millions of pieces of content every day” in December 2024, representing under 1% of posts to its surfaces each day, it now believes “one to two out of every 10” removals were mistakes.

Kaplan said the goal of launching independent third-party fact-checking in 2016 was a desire by then-Facebook to avoid being “the arbiters of truth,” and it was the best solution at the time, but experts “have their own biases and perspectives,” which led to too much legitimate political speech and debate being fact-checked.

People can sign up via Facebook, Instagram, and Threads to be in the first group of Community Notes contributors, which Meta plans to phase in over the next two months in the U.S.

The bigger picture

The policy changes will be a blow to the researchers working to keep platforms accountable for what they host, journalist Jane Lytvynenko, who is currently reporting out of Kyiv, Ukraine, for The Wall Street Journal, posted on Bluesky.

But don’t expect an X-like advertiser exodus.

Enberg added, “Meta’s massive size and powerhouse ad platform insulates it somewhat from an X-like user and advertiser exodus. But any major drop-off in engagement could hurt Meta’s ad business, given the intense competition for users and ad dollars.”