- Mark Zuckerberg claimed content moderation went too far at Meta, and it’s time for a change. Its platforms will no longer rely on third-party fact checkers, instead copying the “community notes” feature from Elon Musk’s X.
Meta is getting back to its roots, apparently.
In a video on Tuesday, its chief executive Mark Zuckerberg announced changes to content moderation across Facebook, Instagram, and the company’s other platforms. Meta will be getting rid of fact checkers and replacing them with community notes, similar to what you see on X, the social network owned by world’s richest man and onetime cage-match challenger Elon Musk.
Zuckerberg, in his video, claimed that “we’ve reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship.”
“The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards, once again, prioritizing speech,” he said. “So we’re going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies and restoring free expression on our platforms.”
Musk has said he bought X, then Twitter, in 2022 to preserve free speech. He gutted content-moderation staff and eventually introduced community notes, where users basically add notes to posts that are misleading or false.
There is no other technology executive or billionaire who is closer to President-elect Donald Trump than Musk at this moment—and because of their history, Zuckerberg could be taking a cue from Musk to set himself up for success with the incoming administration.
Trump and Zuckerberg previously appeared to have a strained relationship. Trump once threatened to jail Zuckerberg, and on another occasion, in the aftermath of the Jan. 6, 2021, riot, Facebook locked Trump’s account. But things seem to be changing since Trump won the presidential election in November. Meta donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration, and Zuckerberg visited Mar-a-Lago, the de facto center of the political universe, the day before Thanksgiving to dine with Trump.
If it wasn’t clear where Meta is currently aligned, the company on Monday elected Dana White, the CEO of UFC and a longtime friend of Trump, to its board of directors. White spoke during Trump’s victory speech on election night, and Trump celebrated his election win with White at the UFC’s championship fight in Madison Square Garden the following week.
In his video, Zuckerberg blamed legacy media for saying misinformation was a threat to democracy after Trump’s first win; he said Meta tried to address these concerns in “good faith.” “But the fact checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created,” he said.
Zuckerberg went on to say his platforms won’t restrict mainstream topics such as immigration and gender so people can share their beliefs and experiences. Meta will dial back filters, too, focusing solely on illegal content: “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.”
It feels like a new era, he claimed, and with that he’s moving his content review team from California to Texas—taking another cue from Musk, who has moved a couple of his company headquarters to the Lone Star State.
“The bottom line is that after years of having our content moderation work focused primarily on removing content, it is time to focus on reducing the stakes, simplifying our systems, getting back to our roots about giving people a voice,” Zuckerberg said.