Rumbling away throughout 2024 was EU threats to take action against Twitter/X for abandoning fact-checking. The EU's Digital Services Act (DSA) is clear on its requirements - so that conflict will escalate. If X won't change, presumably ultimately it will be banned from the EU.
Meta have decided they'd rather keep EU market access. Today they announced the removal of fact-checking, but only for Americans. Europeans can still benefit from the higher standards the Digital Services Act guarantees.
The next 10 years will see the power of mis/disinformation accelerate with AI. Meta itself seems to be embracing this trend by purposefully integrating fake AI profiles into its networks. From now on it looks like the main battle-ground to deal with this is going to be the EU.
Had coffee the other day with a Meta engineer. After Trump got elected, suddenly their manager was like "we have to ensure we have no false positive removals" of content that violates their various policies. When pressed, the manager was like "damn right this is about the election." Previously they were more concerned about false negatives, apparently. Anyway, I suspect they're trying to avoid Elon aiming his ion cannon at them or something. All social media in the US is probably going to swing further right as a result.
TikTok was a warning shot to the US companies to stay in line.
The NIH is doing similar with scientific groups. Essentially, "stop working with this material because the new politician in charge doesn't like it and this could threaten your funding even though this work was specifically written into the grant." These decisions are not based upon scientific evidence, but politics.
It could also be taken as "stop reporting that you are working with this material..."