Facebook’s move to ditch factcheckers faces criticism as Trump returns

London: Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to ‘dramatically reduce the amount of censorship’ on his platforms including Facebook and Instagram is facing criticism with one critic calling it ‘a full bending of the knee to Trump’, according to The Guardian.

Zuckerberg’s announcement to ‘ditch factcheckers on Facebook’ came just weeks before unpredictable Trump to return to White House.

Critics reportedly called his move to ‘prioritise free speech’ a 'major step back' for public discourse.

Zuckerberg said on Tuesday said that he would introduce a system of 'community notes' replacing the existing independent factcheckers.

The incoming system is reported to be similar to the one used on Elon Musk’s platform X where users can add ‘caveats and context to contentious posts’.

In a video statement the Meta founder said that content moderation teams would be shifted from California to Texas where he claimed there is ‘less concern about the bias of our teams’.

Reacting to Zuckerberg’s announcement, Nina Jankowicz who is a former US government official engaged in fighting disinformation, said it is ‘a full bending of the knee to Trump.’

Announcing upcoming changes to the platform, Zuckerberg said his team would be catching ‘less bad stuff’, adding that the platform, however, would seriously respond to ‘a lot of legitimately bad stuff out there, drugs, terrorism, child exploitation’.

Calling factcheckers ‘too politically biased’, he said that Meta would remove a ‘bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse.’

Zuckerberg said the changes to platform’s policy have come about in response to US presidential polls.