Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg became the latest tech executive to grovel before President-elect Donald Trump on Tuesday, announcing that his platforms will soften their stance on misinformation and hate speech.
Meta—which owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp—plans to dismantle its nine-year-old fact-checking program, which employed third-party professionals to verify viral rumors and conspiracies, Zuckerberg said. The company is also lifting some restrictions on political speech, hate speech, and other sensitive content, which previously banned users from spewing vitriol related to a person’s gender identity or sexual orientation, among other protected characteristics. It will now allow users to refer to women as “property,” to call transgender and non-binary people “it,” and to describe gay people as “mentally ill,” Wired reported.
“The recent elections … feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech,” Zuckerberg said in a Tuesday statement. “We're going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies and restoring free expression on our platforms.”
The Meta mogul’s announcement blindsided fact-checkers, misinformation researchers, and civil-rights groups, though perhaps it shouldn’t have: Allegations of social media censorship have become a favored right-wing grievance since 2016, and Meta will likely face renewed scrutiny of its moderation rules under the second Trump administration. The company is already battling a massive antitrust case brought by the Federal Trade Commission during Trump’s first term, which is set to go to trial in April.
Trump himself has dismissed fact-checkers as biased and partisan, claimed that Meta unfairly censors conservatives, and suggested that Zuckerberg should serve time for election interference. In a news conference on Tuesday, the president-elect said Meta had “come a long way” with its latest changes. Asked if he thought Zuckerberg’s about-face was a response to his past threats, Trump ventured, “Probably, yeah.”
But whatever conservatives may believe about social media “censorship,” there’s little evidence that fact-checkers or social platforms have systematically suppressed right-wing content. An October study in the journal Nature did find that Facebook removes posts from conservative accounts more frequently—but only because such accounts post more false information. In fact, far from improving speech on Facebook, Zuckerberg admitted, the policy changes at Meta might yield more “bad stuff” in users’ feeds. That’s certainly what happened on X, formerly Twitter, when Trump’s buddy Elon Musk gutted the platform’s fact-checking and content moderation teams.
But in this new political environment, X is less a cautionary tale than an aspirational model. Joel Kaplan, Meta’s newly appointed Republican head of global policy, appeared on Fox & Friends just yesterday praising Musk as some kind of social media free-speech guru.
Kaplan is not the only conservative moving up in Meta’s ranks, either: On Monday, Meta’s board welcomed Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO Dana White, a Trump friend and supporter. That appointment reportedly ruffled some Meta employees, who criticized White on an internal message board. 404 Media reported that—despite all the public re-commitments to “expression”—Meta promptly and mysteriously deleted those criticisms.
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