Meta says it will stop fact checking, but this shouldn’t be confused with content moderation. Almost all content that is removed—millions of items per day—is reviewed by armies of content moderators (Meta says 40,000 of them) and related AI systems, not fact checkers.

While moderation does target some politically contentious items such as hate speech and health misinformation, mostly it removes fraud, spam, harassment, sexual material, graphic violence, and so on. Zuckerberg said that certain content moderation rules will be relaxed and the teams involved will move to Texas, but the massive operation appears otherwise unchanged. The update to moderation rules may turn out to be the most impactful change by far.