Meta says its controversial decision to put an end to its fact-checking program hasn’t impacted advertiser spend. On its Q4 2024 call, Meta CFO Susan Li assured investors that advertiser demand remains strong and the company’s commitment to brand safety remains unchanged, despite the new measures. Meanwhile, CEO Mark Zuckerberg noted that the community notes feature that replaced fact-checking is simply the “better” system, and he credited X (formerly Twitter) with the original idea.
Li told investors Meta hadn’t “seen any noticeable impact from our content policy changes on advertiser spend,” but didn’t share any specifics. She also pointed to AI-powered tools as helping businesses maximize the value of their ad spend.
Meanwhile, Zuckerberg added more color around the reasons behind Meta’s fact-checking decision, announced earlier this month, which only applies to the U.S. for the time being.
“I’m not afraid to admit when someone does something that’s better than us,” he said. “I think it’s sort of our job to go and just do the best work and implement the best system.”
The executive also pushed back at people’s interpretation of the end of fact-checking as meaning that Meta no longer cares about adding context or combatting misinformation.
“That’s not right,” Zuckerberg said. “I actually think that the community notes system like what X has had for a while is actually just more effective than what we were doing before, and I think our product is going to get better because of it.”
Certainly, there were many hilarious and often lewd memes trolling Zuckerberg’s decision to end fact-checking, most of which were focused on the executive himself.
It comes as no surprise that Meta would end fact-checking in the U.S. just as Trump comes into power, given Republicans’ long-held concerns that they were being censored on social media when fact-checks were applied to their posted content.
Meta’s move to directly rip off X’s idea as its fact-checking replacement, rather than invent a new system of its own, is also par for the course. The company has a long history of copying ideas from its competition, like when it borrowed the concept of Stories from Snap. Zuckerberg years ago admitted this in Congressional antitrust hearings when he admitted that Facebook had “certainly adapted” other features that competitors had led in. These days, he’s less shy about giving credit to those ideas Meta is taking for its own.
