Against Anti-Government and Political Phenomena: How Social Media Has Induced Meta and Facebook to Modify the Political Content of the US

Meta has significantly rolled back the fact-checking and get rid of content moderation policies it had put in place in the wake of revelations in 2016 about influence operations conducted on its platforms, which were designed to sway elections and in some case promote violence and even genocide.

Kaplan made the same comments last year about Meta’s moderation policy which was put in place in response to societal and political pressure to moderate content.

“We will allow more speech by lifting restrictions on some topics that are part of mainstream discourse and focusing our enforcement on illegal and high-severity violations,” Kaplan said, though he did not detail what topics these new rules would cover.

Mark Zuckerberg said in a video accompanying the blog post that the new policies would mean more political content returning to people’s feeds as well as posts on other issues that have been inflammatory to the culture wars in the US.

“We’re going to simplify our content policies and get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse,” Zuckerberg said.

Meta was criticized for taking a hands-off approach to content moderation, following the high profile elections last year.

Kaplan said that over time we ended up with too much content being fact checked that people would understand to be legitimate political speech and debate.

According to WIRED, anti-government militias have used Facebook to recruit new members, while dangerous content has flourished on the platform.

He blamed the “legacy media” for forcing Facebook to implement moderation policies after the election. “After Trump first got elected in 2016 the legacy media wrote non-stop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy,” Zuckerberg said. We tried to address those concerns without becoming arbiters of truth but the fact checkers are too political and have destroyed more trust than they have created.

What a move of Meta will do to improve trust and safety for the free expression of fact-checking organizations: Alain Duke and Mark Zuckerberg

In a bid to remove bias, Zuckerberg said Meta’s in-house trust and safety team would be moving from California to Texas, which is also now home to X’s headquarters. “As we work to promote free expression, I believe that will help us build trust to do this work in places where there is less concern about the bias of our teams.”

According to Duke, it is disappointing to hear Mark Zuckerberg accuse the organizations in Meta’s US third-party fact-checking program of being “too politically biased.” “Let me fact-check that. Lead Stories follows the highest standards of journalism and ethics required by the International Fact-Checking Network code of principles. We fact-check without regard to where on the political spectrum a false claim originates.”

Financial implications are more dire for others. One editor at a fact-checking organization that works with Meta, who spoke on the record, said that Meta’s decision will eventually drain them out.

Duke says Lead Stories has a diverse revenue stream and most of its operations are outside of the US, but he claims the decision would still have an impact on them. Losing experienced journalists who will no longer be paid for the research of false claims on Meta platforms is a painful part of this.

“We heard the news just like everyone else,” says Alan Duke, cofounder and editor in chief of fact-checking site Lead Stories, which started working with Meta in 2019. There was no advance notice.