House Democrats are hammering Meta and its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, after the company announced the platform-wide end of its fact-checking program.
The lawmakers said the shift is part of a larger trend across tech and media companies to curry favor from President-elect Trump, who frequently uses social media to advance false claims — and to accuse fact-checkers of biased censorship when they push back.
"This is just genuflecting to Donald Trump, that's what this is,” said Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), former head of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. “I've already had a lot of concerns about how social media companies don't stop disinformation. I think this is just continuing that.”
Rep. Jamie Raskin (Md.), senior Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, offered a similar warning, saying Meta’s move will come at the expense of fact-based discourse, an educated electorate and a healthy democracy.
“It obviously allows for greater proliferation of disinformation and propaganda,” Raskin said. “This has been the right-wing agenda for several years, to put pressure on the private social media-tech companies to abandon fact-checking.
“And so that's succeeding.”
The backlash arrived after Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, announced Tuesday that it was eliminating its fact-checking program, which relies on a small army of third-party contractors who review content and add labels in cases where content pushes a misleading or false claim.
The program was installed after Facebook was accused of a failure to police its content during the 2016 presidential campaign, when Russia and other overseas adversaries posted countless bogus messages designed to help Trump win the race by intensifying hostilities between the parties, people of different races and other subsets of American voters.
Under Meta’s new policy, messages will be monitored by other users of the company’s platforms, who will be able to post addendums using Meta’s Community Notes feature.
Meta also announced that it will move its home base of policy design and content moderation from California to Texas in an effort to eliminate perceptions of political bias.
The moves were hailed by conservatives, who have long accused the nation’s biggest tech companies of censoring right-wing voices disproportionately in violation of First Amendment rights of free speech.
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), the chair of the House Judiciary Committee, told The Hill that Meta’s policy changes are “great news."
“It’s just one more example of us getting back to the First Amendment,” Jordan said Tuesday.
He said Meta representatives had “called us yesterday [Monday]" to preview the “four key things that they're making changes to.”
“Of course, the biggest one was getting rid of the third-party fact-checkers," Jordan said.
The model of leaning on external policing, rather than paid fact-checking, takes a page from the policies adopted by X under the control of Elon Musk, who bought the platform formerly known as Twitter in 2022 and has since emerged as one of Trump’s most energetic — and influential — supporters.
Democrats have been quick to criticize the trend, saying the erosion of guardrails surrounding online content is clearly aimed at appeasing Trump to the benefit of the tech companies’ bottom lines.
“It's clear that in this Donald Trump era … they're paying particular attention that the incoming administration does not care if what you spread is truthful or not,” said Rep. Pete Aguilar (D-Calif.), head of the House Democratic Caucus. “And that should be a problem to all of us who care about a free press, who care about … honesty, integrity, the rule of law, and in trusting information that you're reading while navigating the complex world that we live in that people are getting their information from a variety of sources.”
The challenges posed by lies, propaganda and misleading information have been a part of American politics since the nation’s founding. But they have taken on new levels of power and significance in a tech-heavy era in which news consumers have instant access to information on their phones, and false claims can spread like wildfire across social media before fact-checkers have any chance to correct the record.
Perhaps no political figure has benefited more considerably from those cultural and technological trends than Trump, whose savvy embrace of social media has allowed him to speak directly to the public without the filter of news media or other fact-checking entities.
Those dynamics helped to propel Trump to the White House in 2017. They’ve helped to fuel his assertion that the 2020 election was “stolen” — a false claim that nonetheless enjoys broad support among Republicans. And they’ve helped Trump rewrite the history of Jan. 6, 2021, a day of violent rampage that Trump has reframed as “a day of love.”
In a statement announcing its policy change, Meta acknowledged that there are certain dangers inherent in allowing the spread of false claims on its platforms. But those concerns, it added, are outweighed by the need to protect the First Amendment.
"On platforms where billions of people can have a voice, all the good, bad and ugly is on display,” the statement reads. “But that’s free expression."
Zuckerberg, in a video accompanying the statement, also acknowledged that the change would lead to more toxic content on its platforms. But it was worth the “trade-off” to defend free speech.
“It means that we’re going to catch less bad stuff,” he said, “but we’ll also reduce the number of innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally take down.”
Democrats have a decidedly different take. They’ve accused the Big Tech companies of growing too large — and exerting too much influence over the messages voters see and the decisions politicians make. They contend that it’s tough to debate any policy problem — let alone fix it legislatively — if you can’t agree on some number of foundational facts.
“This actually shows why it's wrong to leave it to the companies to deal with an issue, because they're just going to be political, and do whatever they think is going to get them more leniency,” Jayapal said. “More money is really what it's about.”
Emily Brooks contributed reporting.
