Meta is giving up on fact-checking and doing it Elon Musk-style

Meta Platforms (META+3.38%) is replacing its third-party fact-checking program with the community-driven system popularized by Elon Musk’s X, as the company continues to signal a warmer approach to President-elect Donald Trump.

“We’re going to get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with community notes, similar to X, starting in the U.S,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a video early Tuesday. The Facebook parent company’s current system, Zuckerberg added, had “reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship.”

Since 2016, Meta has worked with dozens of companies across the world to monitor misinformation on Facebook and attempt to prevent it from getting spread as fact. It began shortly after Trump won his first election. At the time, Facebook was severely criticized for failing to stem the flow of misinformation, including fake news propagated by foreign governments.

Meta’s new program will be available on Threads, Facebook, and Instagram later this year. As it’s rolled out, the current fact-checking structure will be phased out. Its trust and safety team members will be transferred out of California and to Texas and other U.S. locations, the company said.

Like X’s Community Notes, which was launched by the company as Birdwatch back when it was named Twitter, Meta’s system will rely on contributions from users to provide context for posts on its platforms.

The move will likely win some praise from Republican lawmakers who have frequently blasted Meta — and often Zuckerberg himself — for censorship on Facebook and Instagram. Several of Trump’s political appointees have pledged to go after “Big Tech censorship” and defend the freedom of speech.

On Monday, Meta added a handful of new members to its board of directors. They included Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO Dana White, a staunch Trump ally and Zuckerberg’s friend. Last January, White defended fighters’ right to say “whatever they want” after being asked about Sean Strickland’s past homophobic remarks.

“There is a real opportunity here, with President Trump coming into office, with his commitment to free expression, for us to get back to those values,” Joel Kaplan, Meta’s newly-appointed head of global affairs and top Republican, told Fox News.

Zuckerberg has strived to better his relationship with Trump over the last several months, writing in August that he regretted not pushing back against calls from federal officials to remove COVID-19-related posts from Facebook and Instagram, calling Trump “badass” after an assassination attempt, and declining to endorse a presidential candidate. In November, he met with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida and recently revealed plans to donate $1 million to his inaugural fund.

Trump wrote in a coffee-table book published in September called Saving America that Zuckerberg plotted against him in the 2020 election. He also said the CEO would “spend the rest of his life in prison” if he did it again, according to Politico. He has previously called Facebook “the enemy of the people.”