With less than two weeks before Donald Trump takes office, Meta‘s Mark Zuckerberg announced a series of changes to its content moderation practices on Facebook and Instagram, including ending fact-checking and other restrictions.
“The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards, once again, prioritizing speech,” Zuckerberg said in a video posted this morning. “So we’re going back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies and reducing free expression on our platforms.”
The changes are just the latest effort by Meta given that Trump and his allies have targeted the platform and Zuckerberg himself. Following Trump’s reelection, Zuckerberg as met with the president-elect. Last week, Meta’s chief global affairs officer, Nick Clegg, announced his departure, to be replaced by Joel Kaplan, a Republican who has been sympathetic to claims that the platform has suppressed conservative voices.
Kaplan appeared on Fox & Friends, a show Trump watches, this morning to announce the changes.
Zuckerberg said that the fact checking would be replaced by a “more comprehensive community note system,” similar to one that has been deployed by Elon Musk since he purchased Twitter, later renamed X.
Zuckerberg also suggested that Meta would work with the Trump administration “to push back on governments around the world that are going after American companies and pushing to censor more.”
He also unveiled plans to base the U.S. content review teams in Texas, rather than in California, “where there is less concern about the bias in our teams.”
Kaplan and Zuckerberg each held Trump up as a champion of free expression, but did not mention the president-elect’s legacy of attacks on news media, his calls for broadcast networks to lose their licenses for content he disfavors or his numerous lawsuits against legacy outlets.
Trump’s incoming FCC chair, Brendan Carr, has long railed against what he sees as content moderation practices that sideline voices on the right, labeling tech platforms as a “censorship cartel.” He has signaled that the agency would pursue policies that would impose restrictions on how political-oriented content is moderated.
Following Zuckerberg’s announcement, Carr posted a GIF of Jack Nicholson.
More to come.
