Facebook Shuts Down Fact-Checking Program in Wake of Trump Election

Facebook shut down its eight year-old fact checking program this month provoking a slew of criticism that the social media giant was bowing to pressure from the incoming U.S. presidency of Donald Trump, who will take office on January 20.

“Too much harmless content gets censored, too many people find themselves wrongly locked up in “Facebook jail,” and we are often too slow to respond when they do,” Joel Kaplan, vice president of global public policy at Meta, the company that owns Facebook, said in a public statement. "We are now changing this approach. We’re getting rid of a number of restrictions on topics like immigration, gender identity and gender that are the subject of frequent political discourse and debate.”

The fact checking program was launched in December 2016, one month after Trump won his first election as U.S. president.

It came at a time when activists were deeply alarmed at how social media appeared to have caused or accelerated massive riots in countries like Burma as early as 2014 and later on in India.

In 2018, three researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology published a study that examined 125,000 stories that had been tweeted out over a total of 4.5 million times. “Falsehood diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper and more broadly than the truth in all categories of information … it took the truth about six times as long as falsehood to reach 1,500 people,” the researchers wrote. “The effects were more pronounced for false political news than for false news about terrorism, natural disasters, science, urban legends or financial information.”

In order to counter this problem, Facebook paid as many as 90 new organizations like Agence France Presse and Reuters to “address viral misinformation” in some 60 languages in order to uncover “clear hoaxes that have no basis in fact. Fact-checking partners prioritize provably false claims that are timely, trending and consequential." The news organizations were paid as much as US$800 per explanatory article – although they were limited to a cap of 40 such articles per month per news organization.

Experts claimed that the system worked. “Studies provide very consistent evidence that fact-checking does at least partially reduce misperceptions about false claims," Sander van der Linden, a social psychologist at the University of Cambridge and adviser to Facebook, told Nature magazine. "Fact-checking does work."

However, Facebook executives changed their minds very quickly after the Trump won his second election as U.S. president in November 2024,. This has raised alarms all over the world. “I'd like to express the Brazilian government's enormous concern about the policy adopted by the Meta company, which is like an airport windsock, changing its position all the time according to the winds," Jorge Messias, the top lawyer for the government of Brazil, told reporters in Brasilia.

Activists agree. "Claiming to avoid "censorship" is a political move to avoid taking responsibility for hate and disinformation that platforms encourage and facilitate," Ava Lee of Global Witness, an NGO that tracks human rights abuse, told the BBC. "Zuckerberg's announcement is a blatant attempt to cozy up to the incoming Trump administration – with harmful implications.”

“I suspect we will see a rise in false and misleading information around a number of topics, as there will be an incentive for those who want to spread that kind of content,” Claire Wardle, an associate professor in communication at Cornell University told Vox, a news website.

The new system of community notes does not appear to be very effective. Indeed an investigation by the Center for Countering Digital Hate into 283 posts that were considered false or misleading, found that the community notes were not displayed in 209 instances ie or 74 percent.

The announcement has also been greeted by a wave of comments on social media mocking Zuckerberg. "Important News: Mark Zuckerberg was found dead yesterday," wrote a Twitter user. "Despite rumors that he had Corona and was dying of syphilis, I have it on good authority that he was mauled to death by an escaped albino tiger with only three legs & a bad eye. Do NOT fact check me. I have free speech."