Meta's moderation rollback sparks celebration and despair
Some Republicans celebrated the move which they framed as a result of their war against social media censorship. Fact-checking groups were blindsided.
Some Republicans in Congress on Tuesday celebrated Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement that its platforms, including Facebook, Instagram and Threads, would roll back moderation and stop putting labels on content fact-checking partners deem misinformation.
Zuckerberg and the company said Meta had “gone too far” in its attempts to control the spread of misinformation, with third-party fact-checking organizations being “too politically biased.” In recent years, starting in Donald Trump’s first term in the White House, Meta has blurred images and affixed labels to posts that include misinformation, like viral hoaxes. The descriptions in the labels were written and contributed to by third-party fact-checkers. When a post had a label, it often affected the post’s distribution, meaning fewer people would see it.
Zuckerberg said Tuesday that the process had led to censorship and quelled “legitimate political speech and debate.” Instead, Meta now plans to embrace a “Community Notes” style of moderation, similar to the one on Elon Musk’s X.
Fox News reporter Brooke Singman said Trump responded to Zuckerberg’s announcement by saying that he “thought their presentation was excellent” and that “they have come a long way.” Musk posted on X, “This is cool.”
The changes will start in the United States and affect 10 partner organizations Meta relied on for fact-checking, including the news organizations Agence France-Presse, Reuters and USA Today, the conservative outlets The Dispatch and Check Your Fact, the Spanish-language organization TelevisaUnivision and the independent fact-checking groups Factcheck.org, Lead Stories, PolitiFact and Science Feedback.
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