Here's why Meta ended fact-checking, according to experts

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, announced plans Tuesday to replace fact-checkers with a user-based system known as "community notes."

Fact-checkers who were put in place in the wake of Donald Trump's 2016 election have proven to be "too politically biased" and have destroyed "more trust than they've created," particularly in the United States, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a video posted by the company.

"The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech," Zuckerberg added.

The policy shift will make the platform more generally permissive toward user posts, especially on some controversial subjects such as immigration and gender, the company said. Zuckerberg also acknowledged that the change may mean "we're going to catch less bad stuff."

The decision will impact content moderation on Meta-owned platforms Facebook, Instagram and Threads, which count nearly 4 billion users worldwide.

Critics of the move said it reflected a partisan effort to align Meta with President-elect Trump, who has repeatedly criticized the company for alleged anti-conservative bias. Proponents, meanwhile, praised the decision as a sign of renewed emphasis on free speech rather than content policing.

Experts who spoke to ABC News said it's difficult to know exactly what motivated the company, but they said both explanations are plausible.

Meta may view the decision as an opportunity to jettison a policy targeted by conservatives and curry favor with Trump, while shifting the company toward a permissive stance on speech that Zuckerberg has previously avowed, the experts said.

"Zuckerberg knew he'd have a fight on his hands to change the basic tenets of Facebook," Eric Goldman, a professor at Santa Clara University School of Law who studies content moderation, told ABC News. "The question is: Why now?"

Meta did not immediately respond to ABC News' request for comment.

Meta launched the fact-checking program in the heat of intense scrutiny leveled at the company regarding the spread of misinformation on the platform during the 2016 presidential campaign.

The initiative came under criticism from prominent Republicans, including Trump, who accused the company of anti-conservative bias in its evaluation of user posts.

Tension between Meta and Trump intensified in early 2021, when the company banned Trump's accounts from its platforms in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol. At the time, Zuckerberg called the risks of allowing Trump on the platform "simply too great."

In recent years, however, the social media platforms have shifted toward a conservative-friendly, laissez-faire approach to speech, Sol Messing, a research associate professor at New York University's Center for Social Media and Politics and a former research scientist at Facebook, told ABC News.

Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk acquired then-Twitter, now X, in October 2022, moving soon afterward to weaken the platform's content moderation rules and emphasize a "community notes" approach. Last year, Meta reinstated Trump's accounts.

"There's been a shift rightward in terms of attitudes toward free speech in Silicon Valley and perhaps this decision is part of that," Messing added.

Lately, Meta and Zuckerberg have appeared to warm toward Trump. Meta donated $1 million to Trump's inauguration last month, after having foregone a donation to Trump's inauguration in 2017.

On Monday, Meta appointed Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO Dana White, a Trump ally, to the company's board of directors. The move came days after Meta named former Republican lobbyist Joel Kaplan as its new chief global affairs officer.

"It's very difficult to ignore this [fact-checking] announcement in terms of the timing of those moves, as well," Messing said, noting other potential reasons for the move such as cost-cutting or skepticism about the role of experts in policing content.

For his part, Trump appears to believe he influenced the policy change. When asked at a press conference at Mar-a-Lago on Tuesday whether Meta's new content moderation policy came in response to his previous criticism of the company, Trump said, "Probably."

Still, there is reason to believe the policy change brings Meta's content moderation approach into closer alignment with views previously expressed by Zuckerberg, some experts said.

In a blog post on Tuesday, Meta referred to a graduation speech delivered by Zuckerberg at Georgetown University in 2019 in which he advocated for loose restrictions on speech.

"Some people believe giving more people a voice is driving division rather than bringing us together. More people across the spectrum believe that achieving the political outcomes they think matter is more important than every person having a voice. I think that's dangerous," Zuckerberg said at the time.

Goldman, of Santa Clara University, said Zuckerberg may be seizing upon Trump-era opposition toward content moderation.

"It's plausible that Zuckerberg all along has felt Facebook was doing too much content moderation, and he has finally decided to express that view more forcefully," Goldman said. "It's not a new view for Zuckerberg to be questioning the value of content moderation."