Don’t Mourn the Fact-Checkers

The Great American Vibe Shift, rapidly reshaping U.S. culture and politics, has landed at 1 Hacker Way—the gleaming Palo Alto headquarters of Meta. In a video this week, Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced sweeping changes to content policies on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads to enhance free expression and reduce censorship. Key changes include phasing out third-party fact-checking in the United States in favor of crowdsourced fact-checking, similar to X’s Community Notes feature, which allows users to add context to misleading posts. Zuckerberg also pledged to loosen restrictions on “hate speech” and to limit automated filtering to “illegal and high-severity violations” (users will have to flag “lower-severity violations” for review). Zuckerberg also pledged to work closely with the upcoming Trump administration to resist foreign censorship.