Mark Zuckerberg, the world’s third richest person (after Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos) with a personal net worth of over $223 billion, in 2016 was moved to implement a fact-checking program to clean up his social media platform after he was severely stung over the swarming of Meta (Facebook or FB) with misinformation, indications of foreign interference in the elections, and viral falsehoods in the days leading to Donald Trump’s first victory.

He would later block Trump from FB and Instagram (IG) following the 6 January 2021 savage attack on the Capitol by Trump supporters.

Zuckerberg publicly affirmed the 2020 election result which saw Joe Biden winning the presidency and trashed Trump’s allegations of votes rigging.

He’s now singing a different song after Trump’s victory in the November 2024 election. Zuckerberg traveled to Mar-a-Lago in Florida, knelt at Trump’s feet, pledged a $1-million donation to the inaugural ceremonies, and announced the disbanding of FB and IG’s third party fact-checking program.

This is the program for which he had expended billions, getting organizations like ABC News, The Associated Press, the Snopes fact-checking site and other groups vetted by the International Fact-Checking Network Initiative to cleanse FB and IG of misleading and/or false posts.

In shelving the program, Zuckerberg has paved the way for unfettered speech, with Meta relying on its users to self-correct inaccurate and false information.

It could be recalled that in the heat of the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump had threatened Zuckerberg not to interfere in the elections or “I will send you to prison for the rest of your life.”

Not a few observers think he probably crumbled at the prospect of Trump winning the presidency and making good his promise if Zuckerberg remained opposed to him.

From his banning Trump from FB and IG four years ago for being a “great risk” after Trump used the sites to broadcast his lies of massive cheating in the 2020 election and spurring on the 6 January Capitol mob attackers, Zuckerberg, on 7 January 2025, announced that he will scrap fact-checking on Meta’s platforms as the program has “reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship; it’s time to get back to our roots around free expression.”

Third party fact-checkers will be removed and the program will be replaced with a crowd-sourced moderating service akin to Elon Musk’s X “community notes.”

An open letter by the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN), the very same organization that had vetted global fact-checking organizations for Meta’s fight against lies in its platforms in 2016 said, “From what we could tell, the program was effective. In your own testimony to Congress, you (even) boasted about Meta’s ‘industry-leading fact-checking program.’”

The organization bewailed Zuckerberg’s ending the program, saying, “Your announcement’s timing came after President Trump’s election certification and as part of a broader response from the tech industry to the incoming administration. Mr. Trump himself said your announcement was ‘probably’ in response to threats he’s made against you.”

Some of the journalists that are part of IFCN’s fact-checking have been similarly threatened by governments in the countries where they work. Thus, said the organization, “we understand how hard it is to resist the pressure.”

For now, the program’s cessation applies only to the US, but there are similar programs in over 100 countries at various democratic and development stages, with some of these countries highly vulnerable to misinformation, spurring political instability, election interference, mob violence and, in some instances, even mass killing.

“If Meta decides to stop the program worldwide, it will almost be certain to result in real-world harm in many places,” underscored the IFCN.

Among those most threatened by Zuckerberg’s scrapping of Meta’s fact-checking program are the newsrooms which Meta has partnered with for the initiative.

A report by The Guardian points out that Meta’s ending the program not only weakens efforts to counter misinformation but also puts journalists’ livelihoods at risk. “Meta isn’t just killing fact-checking,” says Philippine-based fact-checker James Patrick Cruz. “It’s (also) crippling newsrooms globally.”

In January 2023, Meta, currently the world’s largest distributor of news, started to aggressively throttle traffic to news sites.

By August 2023, global referral traffic from FB to the top 30 news sites in the US dropped by 62 percent, says Similarweb, a web analytics platform that analyzes website and app traffic and user behavior.

“Meta’s fact-checking program was the bare minimum that the platform could do to safeguard the truth in a space overrun by lies and hate,” says Cruz.

And soon, even that will be gone.