Zuckerberg’s step towards Trump: what the world media are saying about Meta’s landmark decision to abandon fact-checking

This step attracted the attention of the international media, because many of them see in this step of Zuckerberg a compromise with the camp of the newly elected US President Donald Trump.

After Trump was elected president in the USA for the second time, the country will face great changes. Billionaires who run technology companies were not the first to notice this. They were with Trump before – the same Elon Musk or investor Peter Thiel. Musk even became Trump’s official candidate for a government position in a specially created department. But now other tech giants are looking for his support, including Mark Zuckerberg. He stated that his company Meta is canceling fact-checking on Facebook and Instagram, allegedly covering up “freedom of speech”. What is being written about it in the foreign media, NV collected.

The Verge explains how Zuckerberg’s decision will work in practice. The program of cooperation with fact-checkers began back in 2016. Fact-checkers around the world had to monitor social networks and identify outright fakes. Shifting the responsibility to the users themselves can, on the contrary, contribute to the spread of false information. Especially regarding climate change, clean energy, cruelty in cities.

“This will primarily affect Meta users themselves, as the program has effectively reduced the influence of conspiracy theories,” Angie Drobnik Holan, director of the International Fact-Checking Network, told the Verge.

Technically, Facebook, Instagram, and Threads plan to ditch third-party fact-checking and implement a system “of community notes” operating in X (formerly Twitter) owned by Musk. But, Holan added, very often “they don’t work at all, that’s how companies show that they’re at least doing something.” Zuckerberg emphasized that last December, Meta mistakenly deleted 1-2 posts out of every ten (that is, they did not break the rules).

CNN edition in story with headline “The transformation of Zuckerberg into a Trumpist will shake the entire Internet” warns that such dramatic changes in the Internet are directly related to the desire of Donald Trump and his supporters to remake it according to their own conservative views. This will allow you to post more relevant content with almost no verification. Zuckerberg accused government structures and “outdated media” of promoting censorship and “destroying trust.”

It is interesting that it was Facebook and its founders who were subjected to devastating criticism from Trump during his first term, reminds CNN — in particular, Zuckerberg was accused of meddling in the US presidential election. There is also a court case against Meta for violating antitrust laws. Therefore, such a sharp turn is also about the desire to agree with the new government of the country and close it. The rule change will also affect some fact-checking newsrooms sponsored by Facebook and Google. Users will see, summed up Zuckerberg “more news about politics and social issues.”

The Guardian notes that Zuckerberg still has big ambitions and is following the actions and steps of Elon Musk. For example, the rejection of fact-checking and development of corrections from other community members first happened at X. The leader of Meta also emphasized that he is thinking about moving the moderator teams from California to Texas. Like, the lone star staff will have fewer committed workers who will influence content censoring. Previously, the headquarters of Tesla, SpaceX and X itself moved to Texas (Twitter).

Zuckerberg, reports the British publication, believes that “Trump is setting the tone for the main debates in 2025”, including speaking openly about gender and immigration (in both cases – in a negative light). An interesting fact that Zuckerberg himself mentioned in his address: he created Facebook with the aim of helping newcomers settle in the US faster, even during the time of President Barack Obama. But now, The Guardian admits, Texas’ tougher abortion and transgender policies are more to the liking of billionaire technocrats.

Meanwhile, Politico warns that Zuckerberg’s decision is more complicated than it seems at first glance. The suspension of fact-checking predictably divided the already not very united country into two camps. While conservatives were mostly happy that they would finally step out of the shadows and gain wider exposure, liberals and Democrats called the idea “capitulation to Trump and extremists around the world.”

But in reality, Politico writes, X and Meta’s refusal to partner with fact-checkers will not make the Internet more resilient to propaganda, controversy, online bullying and prejudice. For years, the corporation has been reducing resources to combat disinformation. In 2023, Meta stopped moderating claims of alleged “stolen elections” 2020. And since 2019, advertisements created by politicians were also not subject to verification.

Zuckerberg’s decision is a clear indicator that politics has always shaped the values ​​of such companies and their public expression, writes Politico. At the highest levels of power in the Meta, more and more Trump supporters are appearing, while Democrats are leaving. Mark Zuckerberg himself said in one of the business podcasts – even before Trump’s second election as the US president – that “my alliance with disinformation researchers was a political miscalculation and a big mistake.”