As big tech In an attempt to appease Donald Trump before he takes office, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Tuesday that his company will replace fact-checkers with user-generated community notes. This work will begin in the United States and roll out globally. Zuckerberg said in a video and announcement on Threads that the change (nearly the same system used by Twitter/X) marks a return to the company’s roots and a way to “restore free speech.” But he added that the change “means we will catch less bad content,” adding, “but it will also reduce the number of innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally delete.”
Even as the president-elect threatens the media, Zuckerberg had a specific call out to Trump.
In a pre-recorded video and threaded post, Zuckerberg said the company plans to “simplify our content policies and remove restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that fall outside of mainstream discourse.” He promised to “eliminate most censorship mistakes by focusing filters on dealing with illegal and high-severity violations and requiring greater trust in filters to take action.” In one particularly interesting detail, he also announced plans to “move our trust, safety, and content moderation teams out of California and our U.S. content moderation team to Texas.” “This will help address concerns that biased employees are excessively censoring content.”
Zuckerberg also specifically called out President Trump in his thread announcement, saying he would “work with President Trump to enact more censorship against foreign governments going after American companies.” Even as the president-elect and his allies threaten the media, the United States has argued that its constitutional protections for free speech are the strongest in the world and that the best way to defend against the government’s trend toward excessive censorship is to secure support from: White House.”
that new york times Officials in the incoming Trump administration were given advance notice of the new policy before it was announced, it was reported Tuesday. Amid the launch, Joel Kaplan, Meta’s Chief Global Affairs Officer, sat down for an exclusive interview: fox and friends. Kaplan called the new settings “a great opportunity to reset the balance for freedom of expression.” Kaplan told the Fox host that the third-party fact-checking system “had too many political biases about what and how to fact-check.” Kaplan added that she wanted people to “discuss and debate” topics like “immigration, transgender issues (and) gender.”
“If you can say it on TV, you can say it in Congress,” Kaplan said. “You should be able to speak on Facebook and Instagram without fear of censorship.”
Since the emergency of the COVID-19 pandemic eased, social media companies have shown a strong desire to stop cracking down on disinformation on their platforms. Under Elon Musk, Twitter rolled back its COVID-19 misinformation policy in 2022 and then established a laissez-faire attitude toward both general misinformation and hate speech. Meta carried out mass layoffs in May 2023, wiping out its team fighting disinformation and hate speech. Of course, Trump himself has been banned from Facebook and Instagram for two years following the attempted insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. His account was reinstated in 2023 and the company promised “new guardrails to prevent repeat crimes.”
Zuckerberg’s announcement comes shortly after Mehta announced he would donate $1 million to Trump’s inaugural committee, part of a group of tech giants doing the same.
