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| - On Jan. 7, 2025, Meta and its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, announced the end of the company's U.S. third-party, fact-checking program for the platforms Facebook, Instagram and Threads, saying Meta would instead move to a "community notes" system — a model currently used on tech entrepreneur Elon Musk's X. (Snopes left Meta's fact-checking initiative in February 2019, reporting we would not renew the partnership begun in 2016.)
On the same day Meta ended the fact-checking program, it also implemented major updates to its policies on hateful conduct, doing away with some specifics regarding guidelines about prohibitive practices. In a post on the Meta Newsroom website, the company wrote, "We will allow more speech by lifting restrictions on some topics that are part of mainstream discourse and focusing our enforcement on illegal and high-severity violations."
One prominent example of a guideline change reported on by CNN — and later mentioned by users on Facebook, Threads and X — said Meta removed a policy previously forbidding users from comparing or generalizing women as "household objects." Snopes received emails from readers who asked for the facts regarding this matter.
It's true Meta removed a policy prohibiting users from comparing or generalizing women as "household objects."
Meta's hateful-conduct policy page displayed a change log on its left side. With the date Jan. 7, 2025, selected, the page showed additions to the document highlighted in green and removals marked with a red strike-through. One section with a red strike-through mentioned a policy against using language referencing "women as household objects." The policy appeared under the section titled, "Dehumanizing speech in the form of comparisons to or generalizations about animals, pathogens, or other sub-human life forms." The company originally added the "women as household objects" piece to its policies in a Dec. 16, 2019, update.
The same section of the guidelines also displayed the removal of a line previously prohibiting users from referencing "transgender or non-binary people as 'it.'" Meta originally added that policy on July 30, 2020.
Wired — which CNN noted first reported Meta's specific policy updates — highlighted the fact Meta also added a new line specifying the company would "allow allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality and common non-serious usage of words like 'weird.'"
Additionally, Meta's policy changes showed a red strike-through indicating the company removed guidelines forbidding generalizations regarding specific derogatory words involving mental health, among other changes.
Meta's Statement to Snopes
A Meta spokesperson told Snopes via email the company would continue to prohibit attacks based on protected characteristics such as ethnicity, race or religion, among others. The spokesperson also asserted it is important to distinguish between speech that is offensive and content that could potentially lead to offline violence, saying that speech may be offensive to many and adding it is not Meta's role to police offensiveness.
The company's posted announcement also said, "On platforms where billions of people can have a voice, all the good, bad and ugly is on display. But that's free expression."
Policies Updated Days Before Trump's Inauguration
CNN noted Meta's policy updates arrived "as the company and its leader have sought to curry favor with Donald Trump and other Republicans ahead of the president-elect's second term, echoing in its announcement longstanding criticisms that Meta was 'censoring' conservative voices."
At a news conference at U.S. President-elect Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago Club on Jan. 7, a reporter asked him about Meta ending its U.S. third-party, fact-checking program. In reference to Zuckerberg, the reporter asked, "Do you think he's directly responding to the threats that you have made to him in the past?" Trump answered, "Probably, yeah, probably." (This answer occurs at the 1:05:49 mark in the below YouTube video.)
CBS News reported in December 2024 about tech leaders and companies planning to donate to Trump's inaugural fund, including a $1 million payment from Meta. A MarketWatch report from January 2021 published similar information about tech-sector donations to President Joe Biden's inauguration. The report did not mention Meta, nor did the company's name appear in a list published on Biden's inaugural fund website.
Meta's announcement mentioning "free expression" stood in similar nature to that of Musk's repeated calls for "free speech" on his own social media platform. CBS News reported Musk financially backed Trump's 2024 campaign to the tune of $277 million. Trump also named Musk and former GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy to a new initiative called the Department of Government Efficiency. The Associated Press noted that the department is "not, despite the name, a government agency."
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