In a time where some, like the U.K., appear to be launching an assault on free speech, others appear to be doing whatever it takes to protect it. Could it be that Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, is falling in line with the latter category? Evidence suggests so, but skeptics continue to scrutinize the sincerity of this commitment.

With President Donald Trump back in the White House, he made it clear early on that promoting free speech was among his top concerns. Shortly before Trump’s inauguration on January 7, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg issued a notable statement: “It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression. We’re replacing fact checkers with Community Notes, simplifying our policies and focusing on reducing mistakes.” Zuckerburg had even stated that he planned “to work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world that are going after American companies and pushing to censor more.”

Now, tangible evidence of this commitment appears to have surfaced, as Monday, April 7, marks the official termination of Facebook’s “fact-checking” program.

The Friday before the big day, Joel Kaplan, Meta’s chief global affairs officer, shared on X, “By Monday afternoon, our fact-checking program in the US will be officially over.” He explained further: “That means no new fact checks and no fact checkers. We announced in January we’d be winding down the program & we haven’t applied penalties to fact-checked posts in the US since then. In place of fact checks, the first Community Notes will start appearing gradually across Facebook, Threads & Instagram, with no penalties attached.”

Community notes are a growing trend on social media platforms in which, rather than a behind-the-scenes team determining what is accurate or inaccurate, app users get to collaborate in a crowdsourced fact-checking system to add context, corrections, or clarifications. Already in use on X, Meta has been slowly rolling out this approach. Monday’s milestone wasn’t so much about launching something new as it was about dismantling an old system — one many criticized as biased and, ironically, often inaccurate.

Keri Boeve, director of social media at Family Research Council, shared the organization’s struggles. “Over the last five years,” Boeve explained to The Washington Stand, “FRC has had a number of posts labeled as ‘false’ or ‘partly false’ by Meta’s fact-checkers.” For example, FRC shared two major reports on Instagram in September 2024 that were labeled “partly false” by Meta’s third-party fact-checkers — one being a map of state-by-state protections for babies that survive failed abortions, the other an updated report on what happens to those babies after the fact. FRC President Tony Perkins also shared the map on his Facebook page, only for it to be labeled “false information.”

“Each time,” Boeve continued, “we appealed the rating and provided data to back up our posts, but the false ratings were never overturned. Our social accounts suffered a Meta-applied reduction in reach because of the false labels.” For Boeve, this isn’t just a business issue — it’s a mission critical one. “Social media is an important part of FRC’s work and mission because it allows us to reach people in a variety of ways.”

She continued, “Viewers may not always have time to open an email or watch a broadcast, but as they scroll through social media, they can see a post highlighting a Bible verse from our ‘Stand on the Word’ Bible reading plan, watch a reel of a recent interview with a congress member, or see the headline from a new Washington Stand article.” In effect, “It’s a bite-sized version of FRC that complements the broad range of work that we do.”

Boeve’s experience is far from unique. Under Kaplan’s X announcement, users flooded the comments with their own tales of frustration. For instance, one user commented, “I posted an ad last week that got fact checked for something unrelated to what my ad was about. As a result, my ad performance tanked. It would have taken at least a week to appeal the false ‘fact check.’ Good riddance to a broken system.”

Another user vented, “Your ‘fact checking’ was nothing more than State Run opposition and censorship. We should all bring class action lawsuits against your company for violating our First Amendment rights.” Ultimately, the tidal wave of comments celebrating the program’s demise seemed endless, with some even pleading for the restoration of “old” accounts they claimed were unfairly axed by the fact-checking regime.

For those impacted, the prevailing sentiment is that the program “should’ve never existed.” As Meta ushers in this “out with the old, in with the new” era, Boeve sees it as “a good step in the right direction,” particularly given that “their ‘independent’ fact-checking program consisted mainly of liberal outlets that would often wield their fact-checking power to denigrate certain viewpoints.”

Meta’s testing of the community notes allowed up to 200,000 potential contributors. “Meta won’t decide what gets rated or written,” the company asserted, “contributors from our community will. And to safeguard against bias, notes won’t be published unless contributors with a range of viewpoints broadly agree on them. This isn’t majority rules. No matter how many contributors agree on a note, it won’t be published unless people who normally disagree decide that it provides helpful context.”

Boeve concluded, “This effort by Meta to end their biased fact-checking program will help ensure Facebook and Instagram posts can stand on their own merit, rather than suffer reduced visibility and inaccurate labeling.”