The Era Of Presidential Toxicity Begins As Meta Kills Third-Party Fact-Checking

While disappointing, it is a move that surprised no one, and the third of many announcements that will change Meta drastically in the foreseeable future.  Last week, Joel Kaplan was promoted to chief global affairs officer, the company’s most senior policy role, replacing the outgoing Nick Clegg—said in a blog post that the aim is to provide context from “people across a diverse range of perspectives.” Community Notes will be written and rated by contributing users, with Meta having no part in the process or in determining which ones appear. The blog post detailed other changes that were made to how the platform handles high and low-severity violations.

Yesterday Meta also announced that Dana White, John Elkann and Charlie Songhurst have been elected to the company’s board of directors.

“The reality is, this is a tradeoff,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in an accompanying video. “It means that we’re going to catch less bad stuff, but we’ll also reduce the number of innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally take down.”

Meta is also removing restrictions on civic content in topics like gender, gender identity, and immigration across Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, as well as throttling back changes the company introduced in 2021 to reduce the amount of political content users see.

Presidential Effect

So what is different, and why make this change now - it is impossible to see how the timing of these three changes relates to the President-elect taking office on January 20, 2025.  The moves do appear to appease the incoming President and his 'style' of communicating.

Impact on Advertisers?

Brand-safety tides are shifting; there was a time when Meta used to bend over backward to address advertisers' brand safety concerns, but perhaps this is a thing of the past and Meta has officially entered a new era.

Advertiser boycotts and similar actions were historically seen as leverage for marketers. A notable instance was the 2020 #StopHateForProfit movement, where hundreds of major brands protested Meta's policies regarding hate speech and misinformation.