In a shameless act of genuflection toward the incoming Trump administration, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Tuesday that his social media platforms — which include Facebook and Instagram — will be getting rid of fact-checking partners and replacing them with a “community notes” model like that found on X.

There could be little doubt about whom Meta aimed to please with these changes: Donald Trump and his far-right political movement.

In a video message explaining the announcement, Zuckerberg framed the new policies in the Republican lexicon of “free expression” against “censorship,” echoing right-wing talking points about how the social media platform’s third-party fact checkers have been prone to “political bias.”

And ending the fact-checking program was a direct demand of Trump’s pick for Federal Communications Commission chair and current FCC commissioner, Brendan Carr, according to The Verge.

Then there was the venue: News of the changes was first shared by Meta’s chief global affairs officer Joel Kaplan in an exclusive on “Fox & Friends,” Trump’s favorite show.

Zuckerberg and his executives’ naked pandering is worthy of contempt. As is the tech mogul’s decision last month to donate $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund.

Zuck is just one of the most prominent Silicon Valley billionaires making moves to lick the president-elect’s boots. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Jeff Bezos’s Amazon both donated $1 million to the Trump fund. And Elon Musk’s ultra-MAGA performance needs no mention. There’s nothing surprising about the machinations of the mega-rich when it comes to aligning with power.

When it comes to pandering by shifting their businesses to be less accountable, the full effects remain to be seen, but we can be confident it will poison the discourse with even more right-wing garbage.

Meta platforms will now follow in the footsteps of X and become more filled with unchecked, reliably racist conspiracy theories, a proliferation of neo-Nazi accounts, hate speech, and violence. Zuckerberg himself admitted in his announcement that “we’re going to catch less bad stuff.”

Liberals have wrongly treated Trump’s rise as a problem of disinformation gone wild, and one that could be fixed with just enough fact-checking.

None of this, though, should lead us to draw the wrong conclusions about the value of social media fact-checking, or fact-checking more broadly, when it comes to combating the far right and the appeal of its conspiratorial world view. For a decade now, liberals have wrongly treated Trump’s rise as a problem of disinformation gone wild, and one that could be fixed with just enough........

© The Intercept