Meta's Abandonment of Content Moderation and Fact Checking Points to a Chilling New Era of Big Tech Backsliding

WASHINGTON — On Tuesday, Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the platform giant will abandon professional third-party content moderation and fact checking in favor of the user-generated “Community Notes” model Elon Musk uses.

Zuckerberg characterized the move, which will take effect on Facebook and Instagram, as a defense of free speech, denigrating trained fact checkers as “too politically biased.” Meta’s new approach will begin in the United States, Zuckerberg said, adding that his company will work with the Trump administration to oppose any foreign governments’ policies that attempt to rein in the global spread of hate and disinformation and curtail other abuses from powerful technology companies like Google, Meta and X.

Just prior to the 2024 U.S. elections, the Center for Countering Digital Hate studied X’s Community Notes approach and found that the system broadly failed to display corrections on false and misleading claims about the elections. At the time of the report’s release last October, these unchecked posts had amassed more than two billion views.

Free Press Senior Counsel and Director of Digital Justice and Civil Rights Nora Benavidez said: 

“Contrary to Mark Zuckerberg’s claims, content moderation has never been a tool to repress free speech; it is a principle that the platforms themselves developed to promote dialogue and protect truth for users. Meta’s new promise to scale back fact checking isn’t surprising — Zuckerberg is one of many billionaires who are cozying up to dangerous demagogues like Trump and pushing initiatives that favor their bottom lines at the expense of everything and everyone else.  

“Just last week we learned that Meta smart glasses were used in a deadly attack that killed 14 people in New Orleans. A responsible platform owner would pause, wonder about the harm his products are causing and tread carefully. Not Zuckerberg. Instead, he’s abandoning all efforts to protect public health, safety and our democracy. He’s saying yes to more lies, yes to more harassment, yes to more hate.  

“While Zuckerberg characterized the platform giant’s new approach as a defense of free speech, its real intentions are twofold: Ditch the technology company’s responsibility to protect its many users, and align the company more closely with an incoming president who’s a known enemy of accountability.

“Everyone should be concerned when major technology firms and their billionaire owners kowtow to a leader like Trump who is intent on undermining the checks and balances that are fundamental to a healthy democracy. By wrapping his move in the rhetoric of the First Amendment, Zuckerberg himself is also dodging accountability.”