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Meta said Tuesday it would end its long-standing fact-checking program, a policy instituted to limit the spread of misinformation on its social media apps, in a clear sign of how the company was repositioning itself for the presidency. Trump and supporting his weight. unrestricted speech online.

Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, said it would now allow more expression, rely on its users to correct inaccurate and false posts and take a more personalized approach to political content. He described the changes with regretful language, saying he had strayed too far from his values ​​over the previous decade.

“It’s time to get back to our roots around free speech,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a video announcing the changes. The company’s fact-checking system, he added, had “reached a point where there are too many errors and too much censorship.”

Zuckerberg admitted there would be more “bad things” on the platforms as a result of the decision. “The reality is that it is a trade-off,” he said. “It means we’ll catch less bad stuff, but we’ll also reduce the number of innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally delete.”

Since Donald J. Trump’s victory in November, few major companies have worked so openly to curry favor with the president-elect, who, during his first administration, accused social media platforms of censoring conservative voices. In a series of announcements during this presidential transition period, Meta has dramatically changed its strategy in response to what Zuckerberg called a “cultural inflection point” of the election.

Zuckerberg dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago in November, and Meta later donated $1 million to support Trump’s inauguration. Last week, Zuckerberg elevated Joel Kaplan, the highest-ranking Meta executive closest to the Republican Party, to the company’s top political position. And on Monday, Zuckerberg said Dana White, the leader of the Ultimate Fighting Championship and a Trump ally, would join Meta’s board of directors.

Meta executives recently notified Trump officials about the policy change, said a person with knowledge of the conversations who spoke on condition of anonymity. The fact-checking announcement coincided with an appearance by Kaplan on “Fox & Friends,” a favorite show of Trump, where Kaplan said there was “too much political bias” in Meta’s fact-checking program.

Trump said he had watched Kaplan’s interview on Fox and found it “impressive” and that Meta had “come a long way.” Trump also said Meta’s change was “probably” the result of threats he had made against the company and Zuckerberg.

The influence of Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, who runs X, SpaceX and Tesla, also loomed large in Meta’s change. Since purchasing X in 2022, Musk has removed the platform’s restrictions on online expression and turned to a program called Community Notes, which relies on X users to monitor false and misleading content. Musk, who has become a key Trump adviser, also moved X to Texas and out of California, where he was based, and has criticized California policies.

On Tuesday, Meta said it would also turn to a Community Notes program after seeing “this approach works on X.” Additionally, Zuckerberg said his company would run its trust, security and content moderation operations in the United States from Texas instead of California “to do this work in places where there is less concern about the bias of our teams.”

Appearing on Fox on Tuesday, Kaplan rejected the idea that anyone was influencing Zuckerberg’s decisions.

“There’s no doubt that the things that happen in Meta come from Mark,” Kaplan said. But he added: “I think Elon has played an incredibly important role in moving the debate forward and getting people to refocus on free expression.”

Disinformation researchers said Meta’s decision to end fact-checking was deeply concerning. Nicole Gill, founder and CEO of the digital watchdog organization Accountable Tech, said Zuckerberg was “reopening the floodgates to exactly the same surge of hate, misinformation and conspiracy theories that caused — and continue to spur — violence on Jan. 6. world”.

In 2021, Facebook shut down Trump’s account after the January 6 Capitol riot for inciting violence and later reinstated him. Since then, multiple studies have shown that interventions such as Facebook fact checks were effective in reducing belief in falsehoods and the frequency with which such content was shared.

But Meta’s move excited Trump’s conservative allies, many of whom did not like Meta’s practice of adding disclaimers or warnings to questionable or false posts. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., said in a post on X that Meta “finally admits to censoring speech” and called the change “a huge victory for free speech.”

Other Republicans were skeptical. Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., said in a post on X that Meta’s change was “a ploy to avoid being regulated.”

Within Meta, Zuckerberg’s announcements were met with praise and horror. For some employees, Zuckerberg was finally being his “authentic self,” uninhibited by “woke” critics, three current and former employees said.

Others said Zuckerberg was criticizing current and former employees despite his efforts to moderate content. As angry employees posted about the changes on internal message boards, human resources workers quickly deleted the posts, the people said, saying they violated company policy rules on community engagement. Meta implemented the policy in 2022 to keep controversial social issues out of the workplace.

Meta’s decision to move moderation teams from California to Texas to “eliminate bias” drew particular attention internally, the people said. The company has long had workers on restraint issues in Texas, the people said. In private channels and group chats, others commented that it was okay to criticize Meta’s policy on free speech, unless you were doing it from within the company.

Meta’s fact-checking policy was born out of Trump’s previous election victory, in 2016. At the time, Facebook came under fire for the uncontrolled spread of misinformation on its network, including posts from foreign governments that sought to sow discord among the public. US. .

After enormous public pressure, Zuckerberg turned to outside organizations such as The Associated Press, ABC News and the fact-checking site Snopes, along with other global organizations vetted by the International Fact-Checking Network, to review potentially false or misleading posts. about Facebook and Instagram and decide if they need to be noted or deleted.

The company spent the next eight years investing billions of dollars, thousands of people, and devoting enormous technological resources to solving content moderation problems. Zuckerberg turned to more than a dozen outside companies to help police positions, including an army of contractors from companies like Accenture to do much of the manual work of reviewing positions.

Zuckerberg also highlighted the importance of artificial intelligence in handling many of these problems, given that almost half of the people in the world regularly post to one or more of Meta’s apps.

But over time, Zuckerberg grew frustrated with the lack of credit given to the company for trying to crack down on misinformation, two people close to the CEO said. He felt that the effort Meta had put into the initiative was seeing diminishing results, they said.

Zuckerberg expressed that frustration in a speech at Georgetown University in 2019, in which he said he didn’t want his social network to be the “referee of the speech.” He said Facebook had been founded to give people a voice and that critics who attacked the company for doing so were setting a dangerous example.

Zuckerberg also lamented pressure from the Biden administration to remove content related to Covid-19, a sentiment he publicly conveyed in a letter to Congress last year. In the letter, Zuckerberg said the administration overstepped its bounds in its requests to remove content, “including humor and satire.” In retrospect, Meta should have been more dismissive of the White House’s requests, he said.

By 2022, Meta had begun reducing some of its content moderation and policy teams as part of a widespread corporate cost reduction. The company continues to make strategic cuts on an ongoing basis.

Among the changes announced Tuesday was the removal of restrictions on topics such as immigration and gender identity that Zuckerberg said were “out of touch with mainstream discourse.” Meta said it would begin to gradually introduce more personalized political content, based on signals people were giving about what they were interested in seeing in their feeds.

Zuckerberg has also evolved personally. In recent years, he has grown closer to Ultimate Fighting Championship’s Mr. White and immersed himself in the right-wing professional wrestling environment. He has grown tired of the constant attacks on him and his company and found it frustrating to deal with President Biden’s proactive approach to reining in the tech industry, two people familiar with his thinking said.

Above all, the incoming Trump administration and its focus on speech allow Meta to finally free itself from the Sisyphean task of monitoring the billions of posts flowing through its apps.

“We have a new administration that is far from pressuring companies to censor and is a big supporter of free expression,” Kaplan said on Fox. “It brings us back to the values ​​that Mark founded the company with.”

Kate Conger and Stuart Thompson contributed with reports.