As Big Tech scrambles to placate Donald Trump before he reassumes office, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Tuesday that his company would replace their fact-checkers with user-generated Community Notes, beginning in the United States and then rolling out globally. Zuckerberg said in a video and in an announcement on Threads that the shift—largely the same system that Twitter/X uses—represented a return to the company’s roots and way of “restoring free speech.” He acknowledged, however, that the change “means that we’re going to catch less bad stuff,” adding, “but we’ll also reduce the number of innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally take down.”
Even as the incoming president threatens news outlets, Zuckerberg gave Trump a specific shoutout.
In his pre-recorded video and in his Threads post, Zuckerberg said the company planned to “simplify our content policies and remove restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are out of touch with mainstream discourse.” He pledged to “remove the vast majority of censorship mistakes by focusing our filters on tackling illegal and high-severity violations and requiring higher confidence for our filters to take action.” In a particularly curious detail, he also announced plans to “move our trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California, and our US content review to Texas. This will help remove the concern that biased employees are overly censoring content.”
Zuckerberg also gave Trump a specific shoutout in his Threads announcement, writing that the company will “work with President Trump to push back against foreign governments going after American companies to censor more.” Even as the incoming president and his allies threaten news outlets, the United States, Zuckerberg argued, “has the strongest constitutional protections for free expression in the world and the best way to defend against the trend of government overreach on censorship is with the support of the US government.”
The New York Times reported Tuesday that incoming Trump administration officials were given a heads-up about the new policies before they were announced. As they were being rolled out, Meta’s chief global affairs officer, Joel Kaplan, sat for an exclusive interview on Fox and Friends. Kaplan called the new setup “a great opportunity for us to reset the balance in favor of free expression.” The third-party fact-checking system, Kaplan told the beaming Fox hosts, “had too much political bias in what they choose to fact-check, and how.” Kaplan added that people want to “discuss and debate” topics like “ immigration, trans issues [and] gender.”
“If you can say it on TV, you can say on the floor of Congress,” Kaplan said, “you certainly ought to be able to say it on Facebook and Instagram without fear of censorship.”
Since the emergency phase of the Covid pandemic abated, social media companies have shown a strong desire to stop policing disinformation on their platforms. Under Elon Musk, Twitter rolled back its Covid misinformation policy in 2022, and then followed up by establishing a laissez faire attitude towards both general disinformation and hate speech. Meta conducted mass layoffs in May of 2023 that gutted the teams responsible for stemming disinformation and hate speech. Trump himself was, of course, banned from Facebook and Instagram for two years following the insurrection attempt at the Capitol on January 6, 2021; his accounts were reinstated in 2023, with the company promising “new guardrails to deter repeat offenses.”
Zuckerberg’s announcement comes shortly after Meta announced that it would donate $1 million to Trump’s inaugural committee, part of a round of Big Tech companies who are doing the same.
