Meta oversight co-chair says the company looks like it’s ‘buckling to political pressure’ by ending fact-checking program

The Meta sign outside Meta Platforms' headquarters in Mountain View, California, in November 2022. (Peter DaSilva/Reuters/File via CNN Newsource)

Meta’s decision to end its fact-checking program looks like the company is “caving” to political pressures, said Meta’s oversight board co-chair Michael McConnell.

McConnell, who is a law professor at Stanford University, told NPR on Friday that he would have liked to have seen changes made during “less contentious and partisan times so that they would be considered on the merits rather than looking like this is, you know, Donald Trump is president and now they’re caving.”

Changes to Meta’s fact-checking program come within two weeks of President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration and after CEO Mark Zuckerberg dined at Mar-a-Lago in November. Meta and other tech giants, which have faced fierce criticism from Trump in recent years, have made large donations to Trump’s inaugural fund.

Meta did not respond to CNN’s request for comment.

“I do think that there’s bad optics here,” said McConnell, who said he was speaking personally and not on behalf of the board. “It certainly looks like this is buckling to political pressure.”

Zuckerberg announced on Tuesday that Meta’s partnership with third-party fact-checkers would be replaced with user-generated “community notes” at Facebook, Instagram and Threads, a policy similar to Elon Musk’s X. The company also quietly updated its hateful conduct policy, striking old rules about content that cannot be posted, including referring to “women as household objects or property” or “transgender or non-binary people as ‘it.’”

“Fact-checkers have been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created,” Zuckerberg said in a video announcing the new policy. “What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas, and it’s gone too far.”

Zuckerberg acknowledged that the changes would “reduce the number of innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally take down,” but there would be more harmful content on the platform. McConnell said official revisions to Meta’s hate speech policy “came as a surprise” to board members.

Meta first implemented its fact-checking program in 2016 after claims it didn’t stop foreign actors, especially Russia, from using its platforms to spread disinformation. Meta has since faced scrutiny for misinformation about elections, anti-vaccination stories, violence and hate speech.

Meta’s newly appointed Chief of Global Affairs Joel Kaplan told Fox News on Tuesday that Meta’s use of third-party fact-checkers was “well-intentioned” but showed too much political bias. Trump later said he watched Kaplan’s appearance and said Meta has “come a long way.” Trump is among the Republicans who have criticized Meta for what they view as censorship of right-wing voices.

McConnell said there is “pretty overwhelming evidence” that fact-checkers correct more content from right-wing users, but knowing whether those users spread more misinformation is “a very difficult thing to measure.”

He also said there has been “active and vigourous debate” within the Meta oversight board.

“The oversight board is a global enterprise, and there’s a huge difference in the way in which Americans think about freedom of speech and other places around the world,” McConnell said. “And that really plays out. It’s also true that the fact-checking program has been much more contentious and controversial in the United States, not so much elsewhere.”

McConnell said he doesn’t know what this change means for future elections or foreign government propaganda on the social media platforms.

“There is really no magic bullet to this problem,” he said. “But much of this has to do with not whether the information is true or false but where it’s coming from.”