Target on Tuesday announced will remove its third-party fact-checking program to “restore freedom of expression” and move to a “Community Notes” model, similar to the system in place on Elon Muskplatform X.
The company said community notes will be written and moderated by contributing users to provide more context to posts on its platforms, and the feature will roll out in the US over the next few months. The announcement marks Meta’s latest attempt to mend relations with the Republican president-elect Donald Trump before taking office.
“We have reached a point where there are simply too many errors and too much censorship,” CEO Meta Mark Zuckerberg he said Tuesday in a video announcement. “The recent election also feels like a cultural tipping point towards re-prioritizing speech, so we’re going to go back to our roots and focus on reducing error, simplifying our policies and restoring freedom of expression on our platforms.”
Zuckerberg said third-party fact-checkers were “too politically biased” and “destroyed more trust than they created, especially in the US.”
Meta said it will simplify its content policies by removing restrictions on topics such as immigration and gender, and implement a new policy enforcement approach that will focus on illegal and serious violations. The company is moving its trust and safety and content moderation teams from California, a historically Democratic state, to Texas, a historically Republican state.
“We will work with President Trump to push back against governments around the world that are attacking American companies and pushing for more censorship,” Zuckerberg said.
Federal Trade Commission Chairwoman Lina Khan addressed Meta’s announcement in an interview Tuesday with CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” stating, “We should have an economy where the decisions of one company or one executive don’t have an extraordinary impact on speech on the Internet.”
Joel Kaplan, Meta’s head of global policy, appeared on Fox News’ “Fox and Friends” on Tuesday and said Meta thinks the Community Notes system on Musk’s X platform is working “really well.” Musk, who has been a vocal supporter of Trump online and donated millions of dollars to his campaign, has been in close contact with the president-elect since the election.
Last week, Meta he said that Kaplan will become the company’s chief policy officer, succeeding Nick Clegg, who was the former British Deputy Prime Minister and leader of the British centrist Liberal Democrat party.
Kaplan, who has held several policy positions at Meta since joining the company in 2011 when it was still called Facebook, is well known within the Republican Party. He served as White House Deputy Chief of Staff under former President George W. Bush and also once served as a law clerk for a former Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.
In December, Kaplan revealed on Facebook publish that he joined Vice President-elect JD Vance and Trump during their recent visit on the stock exchange in New York.
“We want to make it so that, ultimately, if you can say it on TV, say it in Congress, you should certainly be able to say it on Facebook and Instagram without fear of censorship,” Kaplan said. Tuesday.
Meta’s supervisory board, which provides an independent check on the company’s content moderation, praised the changes at the company on Tuesday.
“The Supervisory Board welcomes the news that Meta will revise its approach to fact-checking, with the goal of finding a scalable solution to increase trust, freedom of speech and the voice of users on its platforms,” the board said in a statement to CNBC, adding that “specifically in the United States, with right or wrong, Meta’s previous approach was perceived by many users as politically biased.”
Prominent Republican lawmakers have previously criticized Meta and other tech companies over allegations of censoring conservative voices on their platforms. For example, House Judiciary Speaker Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, subpoenaed Zuckerberg and other tech CEOs in 2023 as part of an investigation to “understand how and to what extent the executive branch coerced and colluded with companies and other intermediaries to censor speech.”
Zuckerberg has had a rocky relationship with Trump for years, with the president-elect recently describing Facebook as “the enemy of the people” in March interview with CNBC. The target imposed a two-year suspension on Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts in 2021 shortly after the company determined that the former president’s actions following the January 6 riot in Washington, DC, could potentially incite more violence.
In 2023, Trump was able to regain access to his Facebook and Instagram accounts, but he also faced some restrictions and potential penalties if it would violate the company’s community guidelines. Target at the end removed Trump’s restrictions on the account in July during the 2024 US presidential election.
The company has taken additional steps in recent months to appease the incoming board. On Monday, Meta announced that Dana White, the CEO of the Ultimate Fighting Championship and a longtime friend of Trump, was joining the board of directors.
After Trump’s presidential victory in November, Zuckerberg joined a number of other big tech executives who visited president-elect at the Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida, and in December the Met confirmed a $1 million donation to Trump’s inaugural fund.
