Meta announced Tuesday that it is ending its long-standing fact-checking program, a policy put in place to curb the spread of misinformation on its social media apps. This is a clear sign of how the company is repositioning itself for the Trump presidency and throwing its weight behind unrestricted speech online.

Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, said it would now allow more freedom of speech, rely on its users to correct inaccurate and false posts, and take a more personalized approach to political content. She described the changes using the language of regret, saying she had strayed too far from her values ​​over the past decade.

“It’s time to return to our roots of free speech,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a video announcing the changes. The company’s fact-checking system has “reached the point where there are just too many errors and too much censorship,” he added.

Mr Zuckerberg acknowledged there would be more “bad things” on the platforms as a result of the decision. “The reality is that this is a compromise,” he said. “This means we’ll catch fewer bad things, but we’ll also reduce the number of innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally delete.”

Since Donald J. Trump’s victory in November, few major companies have so openly sought the favor of the president-elect, who during his first term accused social media platforms of censoring conservative voices. In a series of announcements during this presidential transition period, Meta has drastically changed its strategy in response to what Mr. Zuckerberg called a “cultural turning point” since the election.

Mr. Zuckerberg dined with Mr. Trump at Mar-a-Lago in November and Meta later donated $1 million to support Mr. Trump’s inauguration. Last week, Mr. Zuckerberg named Joel Kaplan, the most senior meta executive closest to the Republican Party, to the company’s top political post. And on Monday, Mr. Zuckerberg said that Dana White, the head of the Ultimate Fighting Championship and an ally of Mr. Trump, would join Meta’s board.

Meta executives recently briefed Trump officials on the policy change, said a person with knowledge of the conversations who spoke on condition of anonymity. The fact-checking announcement coincided with an appearance by Mr. Kaplan on “Fox & Friends,” a favorite show of Mr. Trump, where Mr. Kaplan said there was “too much political bias” in Meta’s fact-checking program.

Mr. Trump said that he had seen Mr. Kaplan’s Fox interview and found it “impressive” and that Meta had “come a long way.” Mr. Trump also said Meta’s move was “likely” a result of threats he made against the company and Mr. Zuckerberg.

The influence of Elon Musk, the world’s richest man who runs X, SpaceX and Tesla, also played a big role in Meta’s transformation. Since buying it from Mr. Musk, who has become a key adviser to Mr. Trump, X also relocated to Texas and out of California, where the company was based, and criticized California’s policies.

On Tuesday, Meta said it would also move toward a community notes program after seeing “this approach works on X.” Additionally, Mr. Zuckerberg said his company will run its U.S. trust, safety and content moderation efforts from Texas instead of California “to do this work in locations where there are fewer concerns about bias among our teams.” .

During his Fox appearance on Tuesday, Mr. Kaplan disputed the notion that anyone would influence Mr. Zuckerberg’s decisions.

“There is no doubt that the things that happen at Meta come from Mark,” Mr. Kaplan said. But he added: “I think Elon has played an incredibly important role in advancing the debate and getting people to refocus on free speech.”

Misinformation researchers said Meta’s decision to stop fact-checking was deeply troubling. Nicole Gill, founder and executive director of the digital watchdog organization Accountable Tech, said that Mr. Zuckerberg was “reopening the floodgates to exactly the same wave of hate, disinformation and conspiracy theories that caused January 6th – and which reality continues to spur.” “-World violence.”

In 2021, Facebook suspended and later reinstated Mr. Trump’s account following the Capitol riots on January 6 for inciting violence. Multiple studies have since shown that interventions like Facebook’s fact checks have been effective in reducing belief in falsehoods and reducing the frequency of sharing such content.

But Meta’s move delighted Mr. Trump’s conservative allies, many of whom disliked Meta’s practice of adding disclaimers or warnings to questionable or false posts. Sen. Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, said in a post

Other Republicans were skeptical. Senator Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee, said in a post on X that Meta’s change was “a ploy to avoid regulation.”

At Meta, Mr. Zuckerberg’s announcements were met with both praise and horror. For some employees, Mr. Zuckerberg was finally his “authentic self,” uninhibited by “woke” critics, three current and former employees said.

Others said Mr. Zuckerberg targeted current and former employees despite their efforts to moderate content. When disgruntled employees posted about the changes on internal message boards, human resources officials quickly removed the posts, saying people said they violated the rules of a company policy on community engagement. Meta introduced the policy in 2022 to keep controversial social issues out of the workplace.

Meta’s decision to move moderation teams from California to Texas to “eliminate bias” drew particular attention internally, the people said. The company has long had employees for moderation topics in Texas, it said. In private channels and group chats, others noted that it was okay to criticize Meta’s free speech policies—unless you did so within the company.

Meta’s fact-checking policy arose from Mr. Trump’s previous election victory in 2016. At the time, Facebook came under fire for the uncontrolled spread of misinformation on its network, including posts from foreign governments aimed at sowing discord among the American public.

After enormous public pressure, Mr. Zuckerberg turned to outside organizations such as The Associated Press, ABC News and the fact-checking website Snopes, as well as other global organizations vetted by the International Fact-Checking Network, to sift through potentially false or misleading posts on Facebook and Instagram and decide , whether they need to be commented or removed.

The company invested billions of dollars, thousands of people, and enormous technological resources over the next eight years to fix content moderation problems. Mr. Zuckerberg hired more than a dozen outside firms to assist with police posts, including an army of contractors from firms like Accenture that did much of the manual work of vetting posts.

Mr. Zuckerberg also emphasized the importance of artificial intelligence in addressing many of these problems, as nearly half of the people on Earth regularly post to one or more meta apps.

But as time went on, Mr. Zuckerberg became increasingly frustrated with the company’s lack of recognition for its attempt to curb misinformation, two people close to the chief executive said. He had the feeling that the efforts Meta had put into the initiative were bearing less and less fruit, they said.

Mr. Zuckerberg expressed his frustration in a speech at Georgetown University in 2019, in which he said he did not want his social network to be “an arbiter of speech.” He said Facebook was founded to give people a voice and that critics who called out the company for doing so were setting a dangerous example.

Mr. Zuckerberg also regretted the pressure the Biden administration put on him to remove Covid-19-related content, a sentiment he publicly expressed in a letter to Congress last year. In the letter, Mr. Zuckerberg said the government had gone too far in its demands to remove content, “including humor and satire.” In retrospect, Meta should have pushed back more strongly on the White House’s demands, he said.

In 2022, Meta had begun laying off some of its content moderation and policy teams as part of widespread cost cutting across the company. The company continues to make ongoing strategic cuts.

The changes announced Tuesday included lifting restrictions on issues such as immigration and gender identity, which Zuckerberg said “deviate from mainstream discourse.” Meta announced that it would begin phasing out more personalized political content based on the signals people give about what they want to see in their feeds.

Mr. Zuckerberg has also developed personally. In recent years, he has grown closer to Mr. White of the Ultimate Fighting Championship and delved into the right-wing environment of professional fighting. He was tired of the constant attacks on him and his company and found dealing with President Biden’s proactive approach to reining in the tech industry frustrating, two people familiar with his thinking said.

Above all, the new Trump administration and its focus on speeches are allowing Meta to finally free itself from the Sisyphean task of monitoring the billions of posts flowing through its apps.

“We have a new administration that, far from pushing companies to censor, is strongly supportive of free speech,” Kaplan said on Fox. “It brings us back to the values ​​on which Mark founded the company.”

Kate Conger And Stuart A. Thompson contributed to reporting.