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 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 combating 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.
You Might Also Like
European tech industry coalition calls for ‘radical action’ on digital sovereignty — starting with buying local
A broad coalition drawn from across the ranks of Europe’s tech industry is calling for “radical action” from European Union...
Meta takes aim at ex-employee’s memoir ‘Careless People’
Meta won a legal victory this week against Sarah Wynn-Williams, a former employee who recently published a memoir of her...
Apple reportedly considered building the iPhone 17 Air without ports
After reporting in January that Apple is adding an “Air” option to its iPhone lineup, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman is offering...
People are using Google’s new AI model to remove watermarks from images
Users on social media have discovered a controversial use case for Google’s new Gemini AI model: removing watermarks from images,...