Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg announced major changes to the company’s policies on Tuesday, in the latest sign of its embrace of President-elect Donald Trump.
In a video posted on Facebook, Zuckerberg said the election felt like a “cultural tipping point” as he announced Meta would end its fact-checking program and replace it with a community-driven model like that seen on Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter), as well as lift restrictions on certain topics such as immigration and gender identity.
“There’s a real opportunity here, with President Trump coming into office, with his commitment to free expression, for us to get back to those values and really provide space for people to have the discourse and debate they want to have,” Joel Kaplan, a Republican who was recently appointed Meta’s chief global affairs officer, said Tuesday on Fox & Friends.
The move is the latest sign that Zuckerberg, once a champion of liberal causes, is following Musk’s playbook and seeking to shift Meta’s platforms—which include Facebook and Instagram—to the right, as well as currying favor with the incoming Trump administration.
Zuckerberg is “following in Elon Musk’s footsteps,” Robert Lalka, a professor at Tułane University’s Freeman School of Business and author of The Venture Alchemists: How Big Tech Turned Profits Into Power, told Newsweek. “But currying favor with Trump and his supporters will be far harder for Zuckerberg, given recent history.” He added that the changes at Meta “will have lasting consequences for us all. Even Zuckerberg admitted today: ‘It means that we’re going to catch less bad stuff.’ Future historians take note.”
Repeating talking points used by President-elect Donald Trump and his allies, in a video, Zuckerberg said the company’s content moderation approach resulted too often in “censorship”.
“After Trump first got elected in 2016, the legacy media wrote nonstop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy. We tried in good faith to address those concerns without becoming the arbiters of truth,” Zuckerberg said. “But the fact checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created, especially in the U.S.”
Meta set up one of the most extensive partnerships with fact checkers after the 2016 presidential election, in which Russia spread false claims on Facebook and other online platforms. The company created what has become a standard for how tech platforms limit the spread of falsehoods and misleading information.
But the 2020 election and the COVID pandemic accelerated a backlash among conservatives who cast content moderation as a form of censorship. Facebook, along with Twitter and YouTube, banned Trump from their platforms after the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, but eventually allowed him to return ahead of his second run for office. In recent years, fact checkers, researchers of false narratives, and social media content moderation programs have become targets of Republican-led Congressional probes and legal challenges.
Zuckerberg said his views on content moderation have changed. Meta has made “too many mistakes” in how it applied its content policies, he said, and pointed to Trump’s election to a second term as “a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech.”
“So we are going to get back to our roots, focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies, and restoring free expression on our platforms,” he said.
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Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth College and longtime Meta observer, said it is distressing seeing business leaders “showing performative fealty” to the incoming administration.
“Meta clearly perceives a great deal of political risk of being targeted,” Nyhan said in an interview. “And the way Zuckerberg presented the announcements, and the timing, was obviously intended to play to a Republican audience.”
Some observers say Meta may be hoping for a lighter touch from regulators in the Trump administration.
Lina Khan, chair of the Federal Trade Commission, said in an interview with CNBC on Tuesday that she worries executives at Meta are seeking a “sweetheart deal” in the Trump White House.
A sweeping antitrust case against Meta brought by the FTC and attorneys general from 48 states and territories during Trump’s first term is set to go to trial in April. In a recent court filing, government lawyers wrote Mark Zuckerberg is expected to be among the first witnesses called to the stand.
Republicans welcomed Meta’s announcement as validation of their long-running complaints.
“I think they’ve come a long way,” Trump said during a press conference on Tuesday. Asked if he thought Zuckerberg was “directly responding to the threats that you have made to him in the past,” Trump responded: “Probably.”
“Meta finally admits to censoring speech…what a great birthday present to wake up to and a huge win for free speech,” Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) posted on X.