Meta's Misinformation Mess

January 13th, 2025

Lindsey Zhao

In a sign of what’s to come in the business world under a second Trump term, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced this week that he would end third-party fact-checking on his company’s platforms, including Instagram, Facebook, and Threads. In a video released on the Meta website, Zuckerberg said he would replace fact checks by third-party, independent organizations with community notes added by social media users, similar to those used on X. He has begun to wind down various diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies, as well, with Amazon’s Jeff Bezos doing the same. Meta also changed their hate speech guidelines, now explicitly permitting users to say that LGBTQ+ people are mentally ill.

For almost a decade, Meta has worked with 90+ third-party fact-checking organizations like AFP Fact Check and PolitiFact that evaluate the accuracy and authenticity of content that’s posted on each of Meta’s platforms. While the fact-checkers don’t have any power themselves to restrict content, if a post is found to be spreading misinformation, Meta limits the post’s algorithmic reach, taking down serious violations of their Community Guidelines (like hate speech or fraudulent accounts.) Thus, Meta has the final say on all content that is taken down or restricted.

Critics, mostly right-wing Republicans, have chafed under what they have viewed as a suppression of their right to free speech. Experts generally agree that misinformation from the political right gets flagged and reviewed more often than left-wing misinformation. While some argue this trend is because conservative misinformation is more widely spread on social media (a macroanalysis of Meta data found that 97% of ‘fake news’ is seen by right wing users, ) others, including Zuckerberg, have argued it’s because fact checkers have become biased and unreliable: hence, the shift to Community Notes.

President elect Donald Trump has claimed part of this victory for himself, too. Last year, he threatened to throw Zuckerberg in prison “for life” after he admitted Meta took down content under pressure from Biden’s administration surrounding the pandemic and the 2020 election cycle. Trump has also railed against “censorship” on mainstream social media in the past--with his ban from X in fact part of the reason he founded Truth Social.

“Too much harmless content gets censored, too many people find themselves wrongly locked up in 'Facebook jail'.”

Joel Kaplan, Chief Global Affairs Officer at Meta

Business executives see Trump’s victory as a “cultural tipping point” from the election, when a majority of Americans chose Trump to be their next commander-in-chief.

Fact checkers and media literacy organizations worry this could exacerbate the spread of harmful misinformation on the internet by leaving ‘fact-checking’ in the hands of, frankly, random social media users.

“Facts are not censorship. Fact-checkers never censored anything."

Neil Brown, president of the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, a nonprofit devoted to media literacy

Meta’s decision could also deal a serious blow to fact-checking companies, since Meta’s partnerships with them accounted for 45% of the total income of all fact-checking organizations in 2023. This could impact their ability to check for misinformation in other places.