President-elect Trump on Tuesday said that social media giant Meta has progressed as a company after it announced that it would eliminate its fact-checking program.
“Honestly, I think they’ve come a long way — Meta, Facebook, I think they’ve come a long way,” he said, adding that he watched a Fox interview with Meta’s head of policy, Joel Kaplan, and he was “impressive.”
Trump then replied “probably” when asked if the move is CEO Mark Zuckerberg directly responding to threats the president-elect has made against him.
Meta announced a series of changes to its content moderation policies in what Zuckerberg said was an effort to embrace free speech.
The changes, which come just weeks before Trump is set to be sworn in, mark a major move for the parent company of Instagram and Facebook. Zuckerberg in his announcement cited the recent election as a driving force in the company’s decision, slamming “governments and legacy media” as pushing the company to “censor more and more.”
The changes will be implemented on both Facebook and Instagram, along with Threads. Meta’s years-long fact-checking program enlisted the help of third-party fact-checkers that moderated posts in more than 60 languages, but the company has said the practice eventually became too restrictive.
When tech billionaire Elon Musk, who is a close ally of Trump, purchased X, then known as Twitter, in 2021, he implemented a system that relies on community notes.
Meta also announced this week that Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO and President Dana White, another Trump ally, will join the company’s board of directors.
