Facebook ends its fact-checking program.

I’m Isaac Saul, and this is Tangle: an independent, nonpartisan, subscriber-supported politics newsletter that summarizes the best arguments from across the political spectrum on the news of the day — then “my take.”

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Today's read: 13 minutes.

We’re going to grade our work.

This Friday, in a members-only post, we’re going to be reviewing our work from 2024 — looking back on how “my take” has aged; grading our coverage; and reflecting on what we’ve learned, what we got right, and what we got wrong. If you’re a member, keep an eye out for the Friday edition in your inbox.

Quick hits.

1. The Palisades Fire spread rapidly across Los Angeles County, covering nearly 3,000 acres as of Wednesday morning. Authorities have evacuated more than 30,000 people, and approximately 10,000 homes are considered threatened. (The fire)
2. In a news conference on Tuesday, President-elect Donald Trump discussed his goal of gaining control of Greenland and the Panama Canal, saying he would not rule out the use of military force to do so. Trump also suggested using “economic force” to compel Canada to become a U.S. state and said he would change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. (The comments)
3. Judge Aileen Cannon temporarily blocked Special Counsel Jack Smith from releasing his report on the investigations into President-elect Trump’s election interference and classified documents cases. The order will remain in effect while a federal appeals court hears a challenge to the report’s release. (The order) Separately, Trump filed a request with the Supreme Court to block his sentencing in his “hush money” case, scheduled for January 10. (The request)
4. The House of Representatives passed the Laken Riley Act, named after the Georgia student who was murdered by an unauthorized migrant, requiring the Department of Homeland Security to detain unauthorized migrants accused of theft, burglary, or shoplifting. The bill passed with bipartisan support and will now be taken up by the Senate. (The bill)
5. A 7.1-magnitude earthquake struck southern Tibet, killing at least 126 people and injuring 188 others. (The quake)

Today's topic.

Content moderation changes at Meta. On Tuesday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company will end its fact-checking program across Instagram, Facebook and Threads, instead instituting a feature similar to X’s “Community Notes,” which crowdsources content reviews. The company will also relax limitations on controversial topics, like immigration and gender identity, and will allow for more political content to appear on users’ feeds. Furthermore, Zuckerberg announced that Meta will work with President-elect Donald Trump to combat censorship across the world. 

Back up: Facebook was founded in 2004, but it did not publish a set of community standards until 2010. The company acquired Instagram in 2012, then started reviewing content with third-party fact-checkers in 2016. Since then, Facebook has sparked controversy through decisions to censor stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop and numerous posts during the Covid-19 pandemic. In August of 2024, Zuckerberg wrote a letter to Congress apologizing for censoring posts, saying that the company had bowed to government pressure about how to moderate content during the pandemic.

Zuckerberg characterized the changes as a trade-off between catching “less bad stuff” while allowing for more freedom for users to post without repercussions. “In recent years we’ve developed increasingly complex systems to manage content across our platforms, partly in response to societal and political pressure to moderate content. This approach has gone too far,” Meta Chief Global Affairs Officer Joel Kaplan added in a statement.  

The change presents a major shift in policy and further indicates the company’s willingness to work with the incoming Trump administration. Last week, Zuckerberg hired Kaplan, who worked in the George W. Bush administration, to be Meta’s chief of global affairs. On Tuesday, Kaplan announced Meta’s new policies on Fox News, where he complimented X’s Community Notes moderation feature. Meta also announced that it is moving its content moderation team from California to Texas, as Elon Musk recently did with X. 

President-elect Trump and other Republicans mostly praised the move. “I think they have come a long way, Facebook, Meta,” Trump said at a press conference. 

Conversely, Meta’s change of direction has invited criticism and fears about the online spread of misinformation. “This type of wisdom-of-the-crowd approach can be really valuable,” said Valerie Wirtschafter, a fellow at the Brookings Institution. “But doing so without proper testing and viewing its viability around scale is really, really irresponsible. Meta’s already having a hard time dealing with bad content as it is, and it’s going to get even worse.”

Below we’ll cover what the right and left are saying about Meta’s new policies. Then, I’ll give my take.

What the right is saying.

• The right welcomes the move, though many say the decision does not undo the harm done by the company’s past policies. 
• Some argue Zuckerberg’s change of course is a massive rebuke of the left.
• Others say the tech executive’s apparent shift right highlights more troubling issues. 

In Fox News, Jonathan Turley suggested Meta’s changes “could be truly transformational.”

“In the last few years, a mix of House investigations and litigation has forced more of the censorship system under the Biden administration into public view. That is expected to draw even greater attention with the continued discovery in Missouri v. Biden, showing years of false statements about the extent of this government-corporate alliance across social media platforms,” Turley wrote. “While Zuckerberg portrayed Meta as an unwilling partner in this censorship system in his Tuesday video, he and the company ignored several years of objections from many of us regarding the critical role the company plays in targeting and censoring opposing viewpoints.”

“Around the world, free speech is in a free fall. Speech crimes and censorship have become the norm in the West. A new industry of ‘disinformation’ experts has commoditized censorship, making millions in the targeting and silencing of others. An anti-free speech culture has taken root in government, higher education, and the media,” Turley said. “We will either hold the line now or lose this indispensable right for future generations. Zuckerberg could make this a truly transformative moment but it will take more than a passing meta-culpa.”

In The Daily Caller, Gage Klipper called the move a “seismic shift against censorship.”

The decision “is an overdue recognition of the obvious, and a vindication of everything the Right’s been saying about censorship within Big Tech for the past several years. Government and media were the bad actors all along, weaponizing empathy for others along with the threat of federal regulation to force tech companies into doing their work that the First Amendment precludes,” Klipper wrote. “The ‘objective’ fact-checkers were nothing more than far-left hacks, poisoning the body politic in the name of truth and justice. Open discourse doesn’t mean ‘content moderation’ … and the correct answer to social discord is always more speech.”

“This is an epic indictment of all the forces of censorship in America. Zuckerberg was their guy, he had forsaken his earlier commitment to free expression to become the enforcement arm of the government’s unofficial ‘disinformation’ bureau. His nearly unlimited reach and resources would ensure progressives’ thousand year reich. Now that he’s turned, there’s no more credible person to reveal who these nefarious actors really are. He pulled back the veil in under five minutes.”

In National Review, Noah Rothman said “just two cheers for Facebook.”

“It’s possible to welcome the salubrious shifts in corporate behavior we’ve seen from places like Silicon Valley in the wake of Donald Trump’s election and to be disturbed by the degree to which private enterprise feels it must get right with the people in power if [it] is to avoid negative outcomes,” Rothman wrote. “It’s highly likely that Facebook’s decision to shift to an X-style fact-checking regime moderated by the community — thus, outsourcing responsibility for potentially erroneous checks onto a nebulous ‘community’ — is primarily a response to Mark Zuckerberg’s competitors in the social-media space. But it’s also unlikely that Zuckerberg is wholly unresponsive to the threats to his firm Trump has retailed for years.”

“We should not conclude that the changes Facebook is making to its content moderation are going to be permanent if they are a response to one election. If the censorious regime to which the institution committed itself at the end of the last decade was an outgrowth of the Left’s political capture of the institution and the sense that Democrats would soon control the levers of power, we can expect to see the pendulum shift again along with the political winds,” Rothman said. “This is all a rational response to a government that enjoys far too much power and influence over private commercial enterprises. If the prevailing corporate culture in America must reflect whatever the party in power in Washington believes, we should withhold that third cheer for Zuckerberg’s maneuver.”

What the left is saying.

• The left opposes the move, suggesting it is motivated by political expediency. 
• Some argue that Zuckerberg’s decision is not a reversal, but a reminder that he has no free speech principles at all. 
• Others say the move will have far-reaching consequences for politics around the world. 

In The Guardian, Chris Stokel-Walker called Meta’s decision “an extinction-level event for truth on social media.”

“Less than two weeks before Donald Trump returns to the White House for a second crack at the US presidency, Meta, the parent company of Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and Threads, has made major changes to content moderation, and in doing so appears to align itself with the views of the incoming president,” Stokel-Walker said. “The platform is getting rid of its 40,000-strong content moderation team. In their place? Mob rule… The most dog-whistle comment was a throwaway remark that Meta would be moving what remained of its trust and safety and content moderation teams out of liberal California and its US content moderation would now be based in staunchly Republican Texas.”

“To be clear: all businesspeople make shrewd moves to accommodate the political weather. And there are few more violent storms than Hurricane Trump approaching the US. But few people’s decisions matter more than Mark Zuckerberg’s,” Stokel-Walker wrote. “The Meta CEO has found himself, in the past 21 years, a central part of our society. Initially, he oversaw a website that was used by college students. Now it’s used by billions of us from all walks of life… Where Meta goes, the world – online and offline – follows. And Meta has just decided to take a drastic, dramatic handbrake turn to the right.”

In Bloomberg, Dave Lee wrote “Meta’s fact-checking reversal lets Zuckerberg drop the charade.”

“Zuckerberg said he would now work on issues of free speech with Trump — who, just four years ago, was considered too dangerous even to be a Meta user,” Lee said. “There is a view that Zuckerberg has shamefully abandoned his values in fear of Trump and in the hope that cozying up will be good for business. But it would be wrong to believe Zuckerberg ever truly held those values in the first place — and he’s finally found the political cover needed to drop a yearslong charade on safety and shed any pretense about being responsible for the accuracy of information that users see.”

“Really, what the moment allows is for Zuckerberg to claim a different kind of victory by throwing in accusations that its fact-checkers were politically biased,” Lee wrote. “What we’re seeing in Silicon Valley, above all else, is a backlash to the accountability of the Biden era. A big part of that, as evidenced by his ‘legacy media’ jibe, is Zuckerberg’s belief — shared by many in the tech business as though it were gospel — that editors and publishers sent reporters out like attack dogs to take down Meta’s business so that old media could somehow return to its glory years. It is ludicrous, of course, but it has given many tech leaders the excuse they need to treat bad press as disingenuous attacks rather than an examination of their actions and character.”

In Heise, Torsten Beeck said “Zuckerberg risks digital chaos.”

“Zuckerberg speaks of a triumph of freedom of opinion and speech. But the reality is different. Social networks such as Facebook and Instagram are not neutral. They are driven by algorithms that maximize interactions. The more polarizing or emotional the content, the greater its reach. Without moderation, this effect will explode. The result? A flood of disinformation, hate speech and radicalization,” Beeck wrote. “Anyone who believes that a ‘free platform’ automatically leads to better discourse is ignoring experience. 4chan or Telegram show where this leads: toxic spaces that are abused by extremist groups.”

“Meta is not a hobby project, but one of the most powerful communication platforms. Zuckerberg has a responsibility – to his users and to society. Its platforms shape public debates and influence how we communicate with each other. Abolishing moderation in this context opens the door to manipulation, hatred, and chaos,” Beeck said. “The invocation of ‘freedom of speech’ is pure window dressing. True freedom of speech does not mean that every lie and every hate comment can be spread unfiltered. Rather, it requires a space in which fact-based discussions are possible.”

My take.

Reminder: "My take" is a section where I give myself space to share my own personal opinion. If you have feedback, criticism or compliments, don't unsubscribe. Write in by replying to this email, or leave a comment.

• I generally support moderation that relies on community over authority, like a “community notes” feature.
• While I welcome Zuckerberg making these changes, his political motivation is obvious — and I worry about corporations working closely with government.
• Fighting misinformation is hard, and no Facebook policy will solve it by itself; it starts and ends with all of us.

As many of you know, I've played and coached high-level competitive ultimate frisbee since I was in high school. One of the unique aspects of ultimate, aside from the superior instrument of play, is that even at the most elite levels it is self-officiated. Players call their own fouls and violations, following a rulebook with instructions for what to do in situations where they disagree on what happened. The entire sport is built on an honor system cornily named "Spirit of the Game," and in most cases it works pretty well.

Today, at the most elite events, non-active referees called "observers" are on the field to help resolve disputes and clarify the rules in cases where players can’t come to their own resolution. But a new pro league popped up about a decade ago with actual referees — people clad in black and white shirts, with whistles, making active calls like in other major professional sports. This development threw gasoline on a long-burning debate among athletes in the sport over whether observers or referees were better, which is what immediately comes to my mind when I read about the "community note" vs "fact-checking" debate taking place now.

Personally, I've always been pro-observer. I think it's the better system because it allows players to manage the game themselves; to call the kinds of fouls refs constantly miss (having played in both systems, I can assure you more violations get missed with refs); and it demands a level of accountability, honesty, and honor among participants that referees does not. In fact, refs engender almost the complete opposite — they provide an incentive to see how much you can get away with without getting caught, a game I happily play in refereed sports. 

For many of the same reasons, I prefer a “community note” system over a professional fact-checker system. Users are often better at policing their own feeds than a relatively small group of empowered (and often beleaguered) fact-checkers. Not only are there more users than fact-checkers, but other users will often have more immediate context for the posts they are reading; and if the audience is somewhat balanced, community-sourced fact-checking will have diversity of thought, too. Watching Zuckerberg's video yesterday, I agreed with most of what he said. Facebook went too far in the direction of policing its users, which created too much censorship and destroyed its trust and credibility with too many people.

So, on net, I support this change. As someone running a politics news organization, I'm also supportive of the decision to allow political content to proliferate more on the platform. Facebook had good reason to initiate its content-moderation changes — its engagement-based ranking of civic posts literally contributed to a genocide in Myanmar — but some of those changes also removed news from people's feeds, which helped destroy the last media company I worked for. At its best, I think Facebook is a much better platform for sharing news, commenting, and interacting with readers than X or Instagram, so I’d be happy to see news stories come back as a user, too.

Zuckerberg has clearly wrestled with this issue in some genuine ways, as evidenced by public speeches on free expression he has given (most notably in 2019 at Georgetown). Still, I have some concerns, starting with the overtly political nature of the decision. As Dave Lee noted (under “What the left is saying”), Zuckerberg has gone from thinking Trump was too dangerous to even be on the platform four years ago to following his lead on how to run the business now. 

I’ve always thought Zuckerberg’s decisions are motivated more by navigating the political climate than following his moral compass, and he’s made it very clear he is making this decision in concert with the incoming Trump administration: He pledged to work with the president-elect, rolled this out right after Trump’s election, hired Joel Kaplan (who has close ties to the Trump administration), had Kaplan make the announcement on Fox News, then bookended the announcement by meeting with Trump and adding Trump ally Dana White to Meta’s board.

Zuckerberg also framed the issue in a misleading way. As the executive director of Politifact noted, it was Facebook — not the fact-checkers — who decided how to penalize users for their posts. The Meta CEO is now trying to blame fact-checkers for actions Facebook took, when in reality all the fact-checkers were doing was adding context and alerting Facebook to posts that might contain misinformation. Whether you are upset about the proliferation of misinformation or the censorship of conservatives, Facebook — not fact-checkers or news organizations or the Biden administration — is responsible for that. 

This all comes just days after Elon Musk announced X would start promoting more "positive" content and start downgrading "negative" content, without really defining what either of those are. The pair of changes — coming right as a new president enters office both men are clearly currying favor with — is unsettling. Just as so many people fretted over the Biden administration working too closely with social media platforms (like Facebook) to censor content, we should all be worried about the wealthiest people in the world, overseeing the most powerful information distribution systems in the world, working hand in hand with this president.

Lastly, even if it’s better than authoritative fact-checkers, X’s Community Notes system still leaves a lot of room for improvement. Primarily, it is too slow. The feature often needs 24-48 hours before a post gets a note under it warning users that it is overtly and obviously false. By then it usually has millions of views, and the truth never gets the chance to catch up. 

There is no great hack to ending misinformation, and any system will have flaws. In my opinion, the best way to fight misinformation is to teach people how to spot lies, think critically, and ask good questions. Empowering users with a “community notes” system is one way to do that, but to improve upon what X has built, Meta should focus on supplying context more quickly when a post is tagged for review, which will help prevent false or misleading information from going viral for long periods of time before getting a community note.

One way to do that might be by using those maligned fact-checkers somewhere in the review process, and having their work shown in collaboration with the community. But that will all be up to Meta, a company that now has the unenviable job of rolling out a new system they have not yet tested and only recently announced in a politically hyper-charged moment — just as Trump takes office for the second time. 

I'll be watching, and hoping for the best.

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Your questions, answered.

Q: Can Donald Trump actually block congestion pricing in New York?

— Nicholas from Woburn, MA

Tangle: Despite saying he will, no, Trump can’t directly stop New York’s congestion pricing plan at this point. In November, when New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) said she would institute the plan (after pausing it in June), Republican lawmakers in New York appealed to President-elect Trump, asking him to block the plan.

At the time, he still could have after taking office. Congestion pricing was approved in New York City in April 2019, and since the law affects interstate commerce it then required the approval of the Federal Transit Authority (FTA) and sign-off from the president. Hochul unpaused the program in November, and that’s when Trump and Republicans came out vowing to block it. However, later that month, Biden and the FTA authorized the program, which meant Trump could no longer block the program or delay it with a lengthier environmental review process. GOP Lawmakers accused Biden of conspiring with Hochul by rushing the review process so that New York could institute the plan before Trump took office, but there isn’t much they can do now; the plan has survived its remaining legal challenges and is now law in New York.  

In theory, Trump — who, remember, is a native New Yorker — still has the option of challenging the law through the courts. He can direct the Justice Department to sue, claiming the policy is an unconstitutional violation of interstate commerce (claiming, for instance, that New Jersey residents are unfairly impacted and did not have a vote on the matter). Since similar lawsuits already failed, though, he would have to get creative. I don’t really know what a new federal challenge would look like, but I’d guess it would follow the president-elect appointing a new district judge who is unsympathetic to congestion pricing before introducing a lawsuit.

That could end up taking years, so if you’re a New Yorker hoping that Trump can stop the plan, you should buckle up and save your pocket change.

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Under the radar.

A new study from Cornell University and Numerator found that U.S. households with at least one person taking GLP-1 drugs, such as Ozempic and Wegovy, reduced their spending on grocery items by roughly 6% within six months of starting on the medication. Purchases of processed foods dropped even more significantly, including an 11% decline in savory snacks. The data suggests increasing adoption of weight-loss drugs is beginning to affect consumer behavior. Approximately 15 million U.S. adults currently take GLP-1 medications, and Morgan Stanley analysts predict the global market for obesity drugs will reach $105 billion by 2030. Food Dive has the story.

Numbers.

• 2 of 10. The approximate proportion of posts removed by Meta in December 2024 that the company says were removed by mistake. 
• 27.6%. The percent reduction in belief in false headlines when accompanied by warning labels from professional fact-checkers, according to a September 2024 study published in Nature Human Behaviour. 
• 65%. The percentage of Americans who support tech companies moderating false information online, according to a July 2023 Pew Research survey.
• 500,000. The approximate number of contributors to X’s Community Notes feature as of May 2024, according to the company. 
• 37,000. The approximate number of Community Notes on posts on X in 2023. 
• 14 billion. The approximate number of times those Community Notes were viewed in 2023.
• 50%. The approximate percent decrease in reposts after a post received a Community Note on X.
• 80%. The approximate percent increase in post deletions after a post received a Community Note on X. 

The extras.

• One year ago today we wrote about Biden’s January 6 speech.
• The most clicked link in yesterday’s newsletter was our interview on autism with Jill Escher.
• Nothing to do with politics: The finalists for the 2024 Comedy Wildlife photos.
• Our most recent survey: 1,937 readers responded to our survey on H-1B visas with 58% supporting the program and wanting to broaden it. “None of the above reflect my opinion. I support the program but it needs changes along the lines Sharma and Saul suggest,” one respondent said.

Have a nice day.

Around the world, individuals are training for a new kind of race: the world “plogging” championship. Far from a typical race, “plogging,” an idea that originated in Sweden, entails picking up litter while jogging. Around 2 million people worldwide currently report participating in plogging. One plogger says, “I love that you help the environment, the planet and meet new people.” Through the World Plogging Championship in 2023, 6,600 pounds of litter were removed from the environment, and more competitions are coming up this year. Good News Network has the story.

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