Palm Beach, Florida:
US President-elect Donald Trump says Facebook’s parent company Meta’s sudden shift in content moderation, including ending fact-checking in the US, was “likely” motivated by his threats against CEO Mark Zuckerberg. He said it had become.
President Trump told reporters at his Mar-a-Lago, Florida, home that he was satisfied with Mehta’s actions, and when asked if he thought it was a response to threats against Zuckerberg, he answered, “Probably so.” ” he answered.
Social media giant Meta Inc. on Tuesday reduced its content moderation policies, including ending the U.S. fact-checking program on Facebook and Instagram, in a major shift in line with President-elect Donald Trump’s priorities.
Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a post: “We’re getting rid of fact checkers who are too politically biased and who have destroyed more trust than they built, especially in the United States.” said.
Instead, meta-platforms including Facebook and Instagram “will use community notes similar to X (formerly Twitter) starting in the US,” he added.
Mehta’s sudden announcement echoed long-standing complaints by President Donald Trump’s Republican Party and Company X owner Elon Musk about fact-checking, which many conservatives view as censorship.
They argue that fact-checking programs unfairly target right-wing voices, leading to proposed bills in states like Florida and Texas that would limit content moderation.
“This is cool,” Musk posted on his X platform after the announcement.
Nodding to Trump’s victory, Zuckerberg said, “The recent election feels like a cultural tipping point where we’re once again putting speech over moderation.”
The change comes as the 40-year-old businessman has worked to reconcile with Trump since the November election, including donating $1 million to the presidential inaugural fund.
Trump has long been a harsh critic of Mehta and Zuckerberg, accusing them of bias and threatening to retaliate against the tech billionaire if he returns to office.
Asked by reporters at his Mar-a-Lago mansion in Florida whether he thought the move was a response to threats against Zuckerberg, Trump said: “I probably do.”
The Republican was banned from Facebook after his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, but the company reinstated his account in early 2023.
End of “Facebook Prison”
Mr. Zuckerberg, along with several other tech leaders, met with Mr. Trump at the Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida ahead of the Jan. 20 inauguration.
Meta has made moves in recent days that could endear it to the Trump campaign, including appointing former Republican Party official Joel Kaplan as its communications director.
He will succeed former British Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg.
Mr. Zuckerberg also named Dana White, the head of Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), a close ally of Mr. Trump, to the meta committee.
Kaplan claimed in a statement Tuesday that the company’s approach to content moderation had gone “too far.”
“Too much harmless content is being censored and too many people are being unfairly locked up in ‘Facebook prisons,'” he said.
Meta Inc. announced it will move its trust and safety team from liberal California to conservative Texas as part of an overhaul.
“This helps build trust to do this work in a place where there are fewer concerns about team bias,” Zuckerberg said.
Mr. Zuckerberg also attacked the European Union, where “laws that institutionalize censorship continue to grow, making it difficult to build innovation there.”
The statement was in reference to a new law in Europe that requires Meta and other major platforms to maintain content moderation standards or face hefty fines.
Zuckerberg said Meta will “work with President Trump to counter foreign governments’ efforts to go after American companies and increase censorship.”
Additionally, Meta announced that it is reversing its 2021 policy to reduce political content across its platforms.
community notes
News agency AFP is currently working on Facebook’s fact-checking program in 26 languages, in which Facebook uses fact-checking from around 80 organizations around the world on its platforms WhatsApp and Instagram. are paying a fee.
In that program, content rated “fake” is downgraded in the News Feed, so fewer people see the post, and when someone tries to share it, an article explaining why it’s misleading is displayed.
Community Notes on X (formerly Twitter) lets users collaborate to add context to posts in a system aimed at extracting authoritative information through consensus rather than top-down moderation.
Meta’s fact-checking move came in the wake of President Trump’s surprise election in 2016, but critics have criticized the proliferation of misinformation on Facebook and the presence of foreign powers, including Russia, on the platform. It is claimed that this was made possible through the interference of
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
