CEO of Meta and founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, announced on Tuesday that the company would be making some significant changes to fact-checking policies and censorship across all its platforms, which includes Facebook and Instagram. Looks like someone is trying to get on President-elect Donald Trump’s good side, doesn’t it? Not only his, but his followers’ as well. Then again, we could be witnessing Zuck having a “come to Jesus moment,” meaning he could potentially be awakening from the stupor of being a liberal as he seems to have been undergoing a significant change for sometime now.
According to the Daily Wire, Zuckerberg posted a video on Facebook stating that Meta would no longer be partnering with independent fact-checkers and would be ending restrictions on talking about issues such as gender and immigration, while also scaling back filters that have censored individuals for harmless posts. He went on to say that Meta would be switching to a focus on free expression, stating the election in November 2024 was a “cultural tipping point.”
“We’re going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies and restoring free expression on our platforms,” Zuckerberg remarked. “We’re going to get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with Community Notes similar to X, starting in the U.S.”
Shockingly, Zuck said that fact-checkers have become too politically biased and untrustworthy. That’s what we’ve been saying for ages now. It’s good to see this guy is finally getting the message. Now if we can only get the rest of the liberal world to see the truth.
“After Trump first got elected in 2016, the legacy media wrote nonstop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy,” he stated in the video. “We tried in good faith to address those concerns without becoming the arbiters of truth. But the fact checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they created, especially in the U.S.”
Zuckerberg said restrictions on discussions on topics like immigration and gender were “out of touch with mainstream discourse.”
“What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas,” the billionaire added.
Zuckerberg said that Meta would dial back its content filters to focus on illegal content and severe violations. He said this was a “trade off” that would lead to objectionable content being caught less often, but fewer people would be censored. He said Meta’s Trust and Safe and Content moderation teams would move from California to Texas. Zuckerberg said Meta would allow more political content to be shared and spread across its platforms after implementing policies that filtered political content from social media feeds. He noted that the Biden administration pushed Meta to censor content.
“By going after us and other American companies, it has emboldened other governments to go even further,” Zuckerberg explained. He said Meta would be working with the incoming Trump administration to work against censorship.
“We’re going to work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world that are going after American companies and pushing to censor more,” he went on to say in the video. “The U.S. has the strongest constitutional protections for free expression in the world.”
Shortly after the presidential election, Trump met with Zuckerberg at Mar-a-Lago. Stephen Miller, Trump’s incoming deputy chief of staff for policy, said after the meeting that Zuckerberg “has been very clear about his desire to be a supporter of, and a participant in, this change we’re seeing all around America and the world, with this reform movement that Donald Trump is leading.”
Trump campaign advisor Alex Bruesewitz said Tuesday that he met with Joe Kaplan, head of public policy at Meta, on Monday to discuss the changes.
“We covered these topics as well as the need to reinstate MAGA supporters who were previously wrongly removed from their platforms under questionable circumstances,” he said. “I am hopeful that the measures will be implemented to reinstate these accounts.”
This is absolutely amazing news, especially for conservatives who have been silenced by these fact-checkers in the past simply for sharing information. It means independent news sources will also have an opportunity to grow their audience substantially and that is good for freedom of the press.
I guess Trump was right. We just keep winning.