Wednesday 16 November 2022 07:08 AM Now that Trump is running for president again, FaceBook will no longer fact ... trends now
Facebook parent company Meta will stop fact-checking former President Donald Trump following his Tuesday night announcement that he will seek the Oval Office for a third consecutive time.
Though the former leader of the free world remains banned from Facebook, the fact-check ban applies to anything Trump says, meaning that factually questionable statements shared by Trump can be posted to the platform by other users.
The memo, which dropped hours before Trump's official announcement from a stage at Mar-a-Lago, emphasizes one of the challenges Big Tech platforms will face as they stare down the barrel of another Trump campaign.
Meta, which announced it would lay off 11,000 employees last week, pays third-party fact-checking organizations to tag posts across Facebook and Instagram with the misinformation label.
Now that Trump has again made himself an active political figure, he will fall under the company's carve-out that applies to politicians.
From a stage at Mar-a-Lago, Trump announced on Tuesday night that he will again seek the Oval Office during the forthcoming 2024 presidential contest
Because Trump announced his candidacy, Meta now recognizes him as an active politician and will stop fact-checking his speech. The company has a carve out that prevents its third-party fact-checkers from tagging the speech of politicians
Facebook sent a memo around a memo Tuesday instructing employees to stop fact checking language from the former president, if he went through with his candidacy announcement
In 2019, the company's vice-president of global affairs and communications (himself a former politician), said 'it is not our role to intervene when politicians speak.'
The company has maintained an exception to its fact-checking policy for politicians.
However, Meta-employed fact-checkers deal with such a constant flow of claims made by Trump that a manager at the company's 'news integrity partnership' team reached out to checkers ahead of the Tuesday evening announcement.
'Some of you have reached out seeking guidance regarding fact-checking political speech in anticipation of a potential candidacy announcement from former President Trump,' wrote the staffer in a Memo.
The document made it clear that if Trump did indeed announce his candidacy on Tuesday night, he would become ineligible to be fact-checked.
'Political speech is ineligible for fact-checking. This includes the words a politician says as well as the photo, video, or other content that is clearly labeled as created by the politician or their campaign,' read the memo.
'We define a 'politician' as candidates running for office, current officer holders - and, by extension, many of their cabinet appointees -
