Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is making sweeping changes to the social internet, all in line with the desires of President-elect Donald Trump and his supporters.
Out with the fact-checkers that conservatives deride. In with more permissive rules for posting conservative opinions.
The recent elections “feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech,” Zuckerberg said in his announcement, justifying relaxed new content moderation rules on Facebook, Instagram and Threads.
“Governments and legacy media have pushed to censor more and more,” Zuckerberg said, repeating a right-wing talking point used to undermine fact checking.
Because Meta is such a dominant force in the industry, with billions of users on its platforms worldwide, the changes will resonate even more widely, reshaping whole swaths of the internet in MAGA-friendly ways.
The company’s newly promoted policy chief Joel Kaplan, a former senior adviser to George W. Bush, sat with the Fox co-hosts and fully agreed with the show’s “censorship” versus “freedom” framing.
Kaplan’s appearance was the latest sign of Meta recalibrating in advance of Trump’s second term in office.
Trump and some key allies have been harshly critical of Zuckerberg and Facebook in the past. Trump once accused Zuckerberg of election interference and threatened to send him to prison for “the rest of his life.”
Meta also has lots of business before the US government. The Federal Trade Commission has an antitrust case against the company that is supposed to go to trial in April.
On CNBC Tuesday morning, outgoing FTC chair Lina Khan said Meta might “want a sweetheart deal” from the Trump administration, “and I hope future enforcers wouldn’t give them that.”
Meta is clearly trying to appeal to the incoming administration.
Zuckerberg, touching on two popular right-wing themes, said the company will “get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse.”
The company will also scrap its partnerships with third-party fact-checking groups and move toward an X-style “community notes” system instead. Zuckerberg asserted that “fact-checkers have just been too politically biased, and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created, especially in the US.”
In general, Meta will be much more laissez-faire about the content on Facebook and other platforms.