“What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas.”
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on Tuesday significant changes to the company’s censorship and fact-checking policies across platforms like Facebook and Instagram.
In a video shared on Facebook, Zuckerberg revealed that Meta would cease working with independent fact-checkers, lift restrictions on topics such as gender and immigration, and reduce content filters that previously censored innocuous posts. He emphasized Meta’s renewed commitment to free expression, describing the recent election as a “cultural tipping point.”
“We’re going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies, and restoring free expression on our platforms,” Zuckerberg said. “We’re going to get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with Community Notes similar to X, starting in the U.S.”
He criticized the fact-checking system as politically biased and unreliable.
“After Trump first got elected in 2016, the legacy media wrote nonstop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy,” Zuckerberg explained. “We tried in good faith to address those concerns without becoming the arbiters of truth. But the fact-checkers have proven too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created, especially in the U.S.”
Zuckerberg also argued that Meta’s restrictions on discussions about sensitive topics like immigration and gender were misaligned with mainstream discourse.
“What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas,” he said.
The CEO noted that Meta would shift its focus to combating illegal content and severe violations while scaling back its content filters. He acknowledged this change would mean some objectionable content might slip through, but fewer users would face censorship.
As part of these changes, Meta’s Trust and Safety and Content Moderation teams will relocate from California to Texas.
Zuckerberg also announced that Meta would allow more political content to circulate on its platforms after implementing policies in recent years that filtered such content from users’ feeds. He alleged that the Biden administration had pressured Meta to censor content.
“By going after us and other American companies, it has emboldened other governments to go even further,” he said.
Zuckerberg expressed Meta’s intent to collaborate with the incoming Trump administration to combat censorship on a global scale.
“We’re going to work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world that are targeting American companies and pushing for more censorship,” Zuckerberg said. “The U.S. has the strongest constitutional protections for free expression in the world.”
Following the presidential election, Trump met with Zuckerberg at Mar-a-Lago. Stephen Miller, Trump’s incoming deputy chief of staff for policy, stated after the meeting that Zuckerberg was supportive of the broader reform movement led by Trump.
Trump campaign advisor Alex Bruesewitz also commented on the policy changes, saying he recently met with Joe Kaplan, Meta’s head of public policy, to discuss reinstating accounts of MAGA supporters previously banned under questionable circumstances.
“We covered these topics as well as the need to reinstate MAGA supporters who were wrongly removed from their platforms,” Bruesewitz said. “I am hopeful that these measures will lead to the reinstatement of those accounts.”
