Maria Ressa says profit wins over safety as Meta ends fact-check program in US

MANILA, Philippines – Following Meta’s decision to end its fact-checking program in the US, Rappler CEO and 2021 Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Ressa criticized the tech giant for prioritizing profits over the safety of billions of online users on the platform.

In a video released Tuesday, January 7, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg claimed governments and legacy media worldwide have allegedly “pushed to censor more and more,” a lot of which he believes is “clearly political.” He also said the recent US election “[felt] like a cultural tipping point, towards once again prioritizing speech.”

Ressa pushed back against his repeated use of the word “censorship.”

“Mark Zuckerberg uses the word censorship. I would replace that with safety. So we now have a platform for more than 3.2 billion people around the planet that has just decided that profit’s more important than safety,” she explained in a Rappler Talk interview.

American conservatives have long criticized social media platform policies that curb disinformation and hateful content, claiming it clamps down on “free speech.” Zuckerberg also said in his video that fact checkers “have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created.”

In a statement, Rappler defended the “critical due diligence process” that responsible journalists and fact checkers go through when publishing stories.

“Allowing manipulative and harmful content to flourish and gain eyeballs in platforms under the guise of ‘free speech’ is opportunistic and puts people’s health, well-being, and safety at risk,” Rappler said.

Ressa has repeatedly talked about the dangers of widespread disinformation and hateful content online, and has asserted that “online violence is real-world violence.” 

In the US, the 2021 Capitol riot was fueled by social media radicalization, with Donald Trump himself inciting violence online. Ressa also talked about how the 2024 US election showed a stark gender gap among young Americans — while young American women are largely progressive, young men are growing up more isolated online and becoming more conservative, no thanks to the rise of the manosphere.

“It’s shocking to me that a company that claims it cares about people [has] taken away safety measures to protect people and especially the youth,” she said.

Meta models X’s Community Notes feature

Instead of its independent fact-checking program, which Meta launched in 2016, the tech platform will be shifting to a Community Notes model, similar to the X feature implemented at scale under Elon Musk’s ownership. 

Under the fact-checking program, Meta partnered with third-party fact-checking organizations verified by the International Fact-Checking Network to identify, view, and rate disinformation and other misleading claims on their platforms. Meta’s proposed Community Notes model will instead see notes written and rated by contributing users to the platform.

Ressa does not believe content moderation should be left to communities. “In order to have wisdom of the crowds, you need to have certain elements in place. Those elements are all gone, and then what we’re seeing now with this particular policy shift is turning that wisdom of crowds into a mob,” she explained.

Journalists and researchers have criticized X’s Community Notes model for insufficiently addressing disinformation on the platform. Previous analysis found that X’s Community Notes failed to adequately respond to false claims related to politics. Even when Community Notes are publicly added to election-related posts, the process can take over 11 hours to complete, after millions of users may have already seen the content.

X under Musk has also been notorious for amplifying right-wing and even far-right extremist content under the guise of championing “free speech.” When Musk bought the platform in 2022, he dissolved its trust and safety council and fired 80% of its safety engineers.

“Part of the reason so many people have left X is precisely because Elon Musk has turned it into his own personal megaphone. There are no controls in place. You see disinformation and information warfare on that platform, and it has literally contributed to exploiting people’s weaknesses, our biological weaknesses,” Ressa said.

Apart from scrapping the fact-checking program, Meta also plans to loosen restrictions on “topics like immigration [and] gender identity” which it says are the “subject of frequent political discourse and debate.”

Zuckerberg also said the company would be “[working] with President Trump to push back on governments around the world.” Meta had recently named Republican policy executive Joel Kaplan as the company’s new global affairs head, and elected Dana White, CEO of Ultimate Fighting Championship and a close friend of Trump, to its board.

Repercussions in the US and worldwide

Meta has only announced its plans to scrap the fact-checking program in the US. But the US “drags the world” wherever it goes, Ressa warned. For instance, she cited US President-elect Trump’s plans to introduce new tariffs that will “choke traffic globally.”

Social media policies in the US will also likely impact the rest of the world moving forward. A number of major social media companies are American, and content on social media today has the potential to reach large global audiences, too.

The US is also seeing a growing generational divide in media consumption habits — young Americans primarily get their news from social media, while older Americans still prefer traditional media. Much of the content on social media is also unvetted, and does not undergo the same rigorous fact-checking and verification processes that journalists and newsrooms use.

“Journalists have a set of standards and ethics…. What Facebook is going to do is get rid of that and then allow lies, anger, fear and hate to infect every single person on the platform,” Ressa said in an interview with French news agency Agence France-Presse.

Ressa said Meta’s move amid the incoming second Trump administration was a “tipping point” in the fight against disinformation and information operations that manipulate the behavior of users everywhere.

“The reality is that we must demand better. We must collaborate together to create a public information ecosystem that has information integrity,” she said.

Rappler intends to continue its fact-checking engagement with Meta so long as the program is retained in the Philippines. — Rappler.com