Disinformation about climate science soon could spread more rapidly online, experts say, after tech giant Meta announced Tuesday that it would no longer use fact-checkers to moderate content on its platforms, including Facebook and Instagram.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the social media sites would rely on its users to correct climate denialism and other forms of misinformation. He also vowed to partner with President-elect Donald Trump to combat what Zuckerberg described as censorship around the globe.
After Trump won in 2016, the “legacy media wrote nonstop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy (and) we tried in good faith to address those concerns without becoming the arbiters of truth,” Zuckerberg said. Now, he added, “we’re going to work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world that are going after American companies and pushing to censor more.”
The announcement is the latest twist in a long-running battle between fact-checkers and those who refuse to acknowledge the scientific consensus that humanity’s use of fossil fuels is heating up Earth.
Social media sites often have served as a haven for climate disinformation and misinformation, and climate denial groups have treated the platforms as a way to reach new audiences.
But following public criticism and pressure from Congress, Meta made an effort to suppress the spread of climate falsehoods and lies, blocked some deceptive advertising and created a Climate Science Center on the platform to provide accurate information to users.
Now, Zuckerberg says the fact-checking has gone too far.
“Fact-checkers have just been too politically biased, and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created, especially in the U.S.,” Zuckerberg said in a video message announcing the change.
Meta, which has 3 billion users worldwide, has ended its relationship with third-party moderators, which includes newsrooms as well as climate scientists. It instead will implement a community notes function — which relies on users to correct inaccuracies — similar to that deployed by Elon Musk’s social media site X.
Zuckerberg also said Meta’s domestic content moderation team would be moved from California to Texas to “help remove the concern that biased employees are overly censoring content.”
He did not offer details on why moving operations from a Democratic-led state to a Republican-led state would fix that dynamic.
Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University who has worked with third-party groups to correct climate denialism on Facebook, warned the move by Meta could help usher in a future where political beliefs supplant a shared reality.
“The trend is towards living in a world where there basically are no facts. This is just sort of another step down the road,” Dessler said.
He added that problem-solving by policymakers can work only if there’s a common set of shared facts. Without it, the system breaks down and it becomes about whatever the “person who has the political power wants,” he said.
Another expert floated the idea that dollar signs were behind the move.
Meta and other companies benefit from the sharing of bad information and use algorithms designed to boost content, no matter how false, in order to make “profit at the expense of the truth,” said Michael Khoo, climate disinformation program director at Friends of the Earth, in a statement.
But there’s still a cost, he added.
“Disinformation’s effects have become more obvious and proven every day,” Khoo said. “We’re seeing it hamstring our ability to mitigate climate change with false attacks on wind power.”
Meta’s announcement comes four years to the day after Zuckerberg suspended Trump’s Facebook account because of the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol. At that time, Zuckerberg said the “risks of allowing the President to continue to use our service during this period are simply too great.”
In his remarks Tuesday, however, Zuckerberg said Trump’s victory in November was “a cultural tipping point towards, once again, prioritizing speech.”
Trump currently has a number of active lawsuits against media companies for coverage he has deemed unfavorable, as well as an Iowa pollster who showed him losing ground with groups he later won.
After Trump’s election, Meta donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration and promoted Joel Kaplan, a longtime Republican operative close to the Trump administration, to a senior role at the company. Zuckerberg also traveled to Mar-a-Lago to meet with Trump after the election.
Meta is currently being sued by the Federal Trade Commission over an antitrust violation because it acquired both Instagram and WhatsApp. The next hearing on that case is in April.
The move on Tuesday appeared to curry favor with the president-elect. It was announced on one of Trump’s favorite morning shows, “Fox & Friends.”
At an unrelated press conference on Tuesday, Trump called Meta’s announcement “impressive.” He also acknowledged that Zuckerberg was “probably” responding to his previous threats to jail Zuckerberg for allegedly blocking conservative content on the platform.
“They have come a long way,” Trump said.
