Chief Global Affairs Officer Joel Kaplan announced that Meta is officially cutting ties with all fact-checkers and replacing any efforts to combat misinformation with an X-style Community Notes system.
The move will be across three of Meta’s top social media platforms beginning on April 7th.
“By Monday afternoon, our fact-checking program in the US will be officially over,” Kaplan wrote on X. “That means no new fact-checks and no fact-checkers.”
“We announced in January we’d be winding down the program & removing penalties,” he added. “In place of fact checks, the first Community Notes will start appearing gradually across Facebook, Threads & Instagram, with no penalties attached.”
It’s somewhat of a nod to free speech in the new Trump era.
By Monday afternoon, our fact-checking program in the US will be officially over. That means no new fact checks and no fact checkers. We announced in January we’d be winding down the program & removing penalties. In place of fact checks, the first Community Notes will start…
— Joel Kaplan (@joel_kaplan) April 4, 2025
Bending the Knee: Now Mark Zuckerberg Makes the Pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago
The move has been in the works for the past few months now, with some suggesting that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been bending the knee to President Donald Trump since his election victory.
Zuckerberg traveled to Mar-a-Lago to meet with Trump within weeks of the November electoral landslide, and Meta announced shortly thereafter that it was eliminating fact-checking from its platforms.
“Fact-checkers have been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created,” the Facebook founder said in a video announcing the policy. “What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas, and it’s gone too far.”
This is great news from Facebook! The way to address concerns over speech is with MORE speech-not suppression. More reason, dialogue, context. The Community Notes approach–just like it’s been here on X–helps provide more balance, nuance and truth to news and other articles. https://t.co/ooMtMCWnqZ
— Carrie Sheffield (@carriesheffield) April 4, 2025
For some who experienced censorship under Facebook (which includes just about everybody who wasn’t allowed to share the Hunter Biden laptop story), the move will be too little. For others whose livelihoods were ruined by Facebook throttling their page traffic, the move comes too late.
Their previous effort to squash opposing viewpoints hit this author twice. A personal blog page with nearly 100,000 subscribers was de-platformed, killing traffic, while a right-leaning publisher I wrote for with over 3,000,000 followers had its traffic reduced to almost nothing. The revenue from both became non-existent.
Facebook and its so-called fact-checkers cost people their jobs. Considering what they did to the country (along with Twitter at the time) during the 2020 election, helping rig the narrative for Joe Biden, it should never be forgotten.
Zuckerberg dropped jaws by admitting Facebook throttled information about the laptop scandal in the days before that election, thanks in part to the FBI coming to them with a message showcasing all the subtleties of a mob boss meeting.
“The FBI, I think, basically came to us – some folks on our team – and was like, ‘Hey, just so you know, like, you should be on high alert… We thought that there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election,” Zuckerberg told podcaster Joe Rogan.
He said that the FBI visit, which he called a “legitimate institution,” prompted him to take their warning “seriously.” Subsequently, he admitted that Facebook had algorithmically throttled the reach on any posts involving the laptop.
Zuckerberg explained that while they were not explicitly instructed to focus on the Hunter Biden story, they did so anyway because “it basically fit the pattern” that they had been warned about.
The American public should also not soon forget Facebook’s role in preventing legitimate COVID information—the variety that combatted the actual misinformation sold by people like Dr. Anthony Fauci—from being shared on its platform.
Biased fact-checkers helped Facebook control two of the most consequential stories of this century. They only changed course when Trump returned to the White House.
They, at best, get a golf clap over this move.
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