Metas oversight board rips Zuckerbergs move to end fact-checking: Potential adverse effects

Meta’s independent oversight board on Wednesday rebuked the company for scrapping the social-media giant’s fact-checking policy earlier this year – urging Mark Zuckerberg’s firm to assess “potential adverse effects.”The board, which operates independently but is funded by Meta, cited concerns that the company had made the changes “hastily, in a departure from regular procedure, with no public information shared as to what, if any, prior human rights due diligence the company performed.”It issued its first rulings on individual content cases since Zuckerberg in January, just a few weeks before President Trump’s inauguration, announced that Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp would do away with their fact-checking teams. In some cases, the board upheld Meta’s decisions to leave up controversial content, like posts discussing transgender peoples’ access to bathrooms. At other times, it ordered the company to remove posts, including ones containing racist slurs.Its comments put the board at odds with Meta’s chief executive, who has been trying to curry favor with President Trump.In January, Zuckerberg claimed the content restrictions resulted in “too many mistakes and too much censorship.”He ended the content restrictions and pivoted to a “Community Notes” model, much like social media platform X, which is run by fellow Trump ally Elon Musk.Musk has similarly argued that fact-checking teams and policies are a muzzle on free speech.In his quest to buddy up to the incoming administration, Zuckerberg dined with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago residence just before Thanksgiving and donated $1 million to his inaugural fund.But the 40-year-old tech tycoon has faced backlash for rolling back the content moderation policies, which aimed to tamp down misinformation and hate speech.The rule change removed restrictions on referring to gay people as mentally ill and to women as “household objects or property.” It said it would focus on detecting content ...