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.
Carr and other Trump allies have also attacked firms that monitor accuracy. That includes NewsGuard, which rates news sites on their reliability. While NewsGuard has given higher scores to outlets like Fox News and The New York Times, one outlet that scored low was Newsmax, which frequently features Trump-friendly lawmakers and allies.
Tech platforms in general have pushed back on the idea that there is systemic censorship of voices on the right, as some of its prominent figures railed against restrictions related to Covid and election integrity. But in his video message, Zuckerberg said that “we built a lot of complex systems to moderate content, but the problem with complex systems, they make mistakes, even if they accidentally censor just 1% of posts, that’s millions of people, and we’ve reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship.”
Zuckerberg also said that filters that scan for policy violations will be changed. “Now we’re going to focus those filters on tackling illegal and high severity violations, and for lower severity violations, we’re going to rely on someone reporting an issue before we take action. The problem is that the filters make mistakes, and they take down a lot of content that they shouldn’t.”
He acknowledged that the “reality is that this is a trade off. It means we’re going to catch less bad stuff, but we’ll also reduce the number of innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally take down.”
Zuckerberg also said that Meta would be bringing back “civic content.” “For a while the community asked to see less politics because it was making people stressed, so we stopped recommending those posts. But it feels like we’re in a new era now, and we’re starting to get feedback that people want to see this content again. So we’re going to start phasing this back in to Facebook, Instagram and Threads, while working to keep the communities friendly and positive.”
Facebook and Instagram have grappled with how to handle the widespread dissemination of false information and lies on their platforms, particularly when it comes from public officials. Trump’s Meta accounts were suspended following the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, given his praise for those who engaged in violence. They accounts were later reinstated.
Just last fall, Trump threatened to send Zuckerberg to prison for life, claiming that he steered his social media platforms against him in the 2020 election. But following Trump’s reelection, Meta has donated $1 million to his inaugural fund, while the tech giant on Monday announced that a key Trump supporter, UFC’s Dana White, would be joining its board.
Meta is facing an antitrust trial in April, in a lawsuit that was brought by the Federal Trade Commission during Trump’s first term. The lawsuit alleges that Meta’s acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp have created a social media monopoly.