The news that Meta/Facebook has ended a nearly 10-year-old fact checking program has many brands & leaders asking how they should respond, but these moves are not happening in a vacuum…

Ensuring accurate information, and specifically fact checking, is only one element in a larger moderation strategy...there were probably people inside Meta/Facebook who supported this but they've been gone for a long time.

For example, Check Your Fact, an official Meta/Facebook fact checker, is owned by The Daily Caller's Tucker Carlson/Neil Patel, which is funded by and has close ties to billionaires like former VP Cheney and the Koch Brothers who profit from dis/misinformation about, among other things, policy in the Middle East, the military, and denying/delaying climate change tech and science.

If you look at how Big Tech, incl. but not limited to Meta/Facebook, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, are accelerating AI-generated content and fake profiles, they see themselves as world builders (absent fiduciary responsibility, but that's another story altogether) and they seem less and less focused on creating value for & centering customers and users.