Meta’s big move this morning does not mean what Washington seems to think it means. When Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook, Instagram and Threads would end third-party fact-checking, the political world read it as a kind of capitulation — a company sacrificing its values on the altar of Donald Trump and the modern GOP’s “free speech” politics. Conservatives took it as a win — like Brendan Carr, Trump’s pick to run the Federal Communications Commission, who posted an approving meme. Liberals were horrified, with Nicole Gill, executive director of Accountable Tech, calling it in a statement “a gift to Donald Trump and extremists around the world.” For liberals, less fact-checking by the world’s largest platform will usher in a digital sphere even more swamped by false or purposely misleading information than it already is. Conservatives, who believe moderators and fact-checkers to be almost uniformly liberal, are confident that a more lenient approach to content moderation will more accurately reflect reality, by allowing a wider range of viewpoints. In reality, Meta dumping its fact-checking partnerships is unlikely to make the internet any more a morass of bias, argument, ad hominem attacks and blatant propaganda. (Or any more a paragon of truth.) On the content front, the company — like the tech industry writ large — has been moving away from the liberal vision of fighting “misinformation” for years. In 2023 it rolled back moderation of false claims about the 2020 election. In 2019, it declared it wouldn’t fact-check ads from politicians. Given all the attention given to content moderation, it’s easy to overstate its importance to the ecosystem. While moderation decisions make for high-profile congressional hearings and effective fodder for culture-war debates, what actually gets seen on social media platforms is still ultimately decided at the algorithm level, mostly outside the realm of political debate. Splashy announcements like Zuckerberg’s today feel like important corporate policy, but actually have a different role — as a kind of marketing to the power structure. And beneath the surface, they underline how politics has always shaped the public expression of those platforms’ values and what they have to offer society. Tuesday’s announcement was just the latest in a series of gestures Meta has made to the right since Trump’s re-election. Last week it named Republican lobbyist Joel Kaplan its global chief of policy; yesterday the company appointed Ultimate Fighting Championship head Dana White — a Trump ally who had a prime slot at the Republican National Convention — to the company’s board. Today’s announcement included the fact that it would move the company’s trust and safety team from California to Texas, echoing calls from right-wing tech leaders like Elon Musk to center the industry in less liberal environs than Silicon Valley. These steps did, indeed, move Meta away from the liberal vision of digital governance. But it’s important to remember that that vision wasn’t driven by the industry’s underlying values: It was largely adopted, under duress, in response to another politically charged moment. In the immediate aftermath of the 2016 election, Facebook was largely an enthusiastic participant in the “whole-of-society” pushback to the online falsehoods deemed in part responsible for Trump’s shock win. In addition to instituting the fact-checking partnerships he just abandoned, Zuckerberg apologized to Congress for Facebook’s role in the 2016 election and invited press to tour a “war room” dedicated to fighting false information on the platform. As perception of Trump gradually morphed from that of a weird interloper in American political life to its white-hot epicenter, that immune system-style approach seemed less and less appropriate — and possibly, for companies like Meta, more politically harmful and less lucrative. “Social media fact-checking works in theory, and the platforms that attempted it deserve more credit,” Nu Wexler, a consultant who previously worked in policy communications for Facebook, Twitter and Google, told DFD. “But the politics of it are close to impossible in this climate, and it became a major pain point for the companies on Capitol Hill.” In 2016 fact-checking seemed appealing to big tech firms; in 2025 less so. (It's not just Meta: “Fact-checking has been a lower priority for everyone,” Wexler said.) In September — even before Trump was elected — Zuckerberg told a popular business podcast that his decision to side with the misinformation-watchers was a “political miscalculation” and massive mistake. That was, of course, with the benefit of hindsight. At the time, it just looked like common sense: Contrary to pitches either for “responsible governance” or getting “back to our roots around free expression,” as Zuckerberg promised today, the decisions made by companies like Meta are made first with the goal of onboarding and keeping as many users as possible, and second to avoid European-style regulatory scrutiny. (POLITICO reported today that the company will continue fact-checking in European Union countries, where the Digital Services Act enforces the war on misinformation by statute.) “Responsibility” was the watchword 10 years ago that led to Zuckerberg’s “miscalculation,” while now it’s “freedom.” Political winds change, and no matter the rules in place on platforms like Facebook or X, users have always had a stubborn, tricky way of getting their message out, no matter what.
| 
