OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA — Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Tuesday that there would be a wider range of speech on Facebook and other Meta platforms.
“We’re going to get back to our roots around free expression on Facebook and Instagram,” he said.
Here are some of the key changes:
Gone will be third-party fact-checkers eyeing Facebook posts for violations in the United States. Instead, Facebook will rely on “community notes,” a system used on X (formerly Twitter) that allows community members to flag posts and vote on the legitimacy of them.
Restrictions on topics such as immigration and gender identity will be lifted.
“What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas, and it’s gone too far. So, I want to make sure that people can share their beliefs and experiences on our platforms,” Zuckerberg said.
Civic and political content, which the company stopped presenting to users in recent years, will be recommended again on Facebook, Instagram and Threads.
And the firm’s trust and safety and content moderation teams will move from California, considered a liberal state, to Texas, considered a conservative-leaning state. The move “will help us build trust to do this work in places where there is less concern about the bias of our teams,” he said.
Preparing for Trump
Zuckerberg’s announcement comes as Meta and other technology companies prepare for major policy and regulatory changes with the return of President-elect Donald Trump to the White House this month.
In his attacks on the dominant technology companies, known collectively as Big Tech, Trump has been particularly critical of Meta, which suspended his account in 2021 after the January 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol Building. His accounts were restored in 2023.
At a press conference Tuesday, Trump was asked about Zuckerberg’s announcement.
“Honestly, I think they’ve come a long way,” he said. He said the firm was “probably” responding to his threats that he had planned to do something about Big Tech and censorship.
Reactions mixed
“This is cool,” Elon Musk said of the Meta announcement. Musk bought Twitter in 2023 and renamed it X and is a close adviser to Trump.
X Corp. CEO Linda Yaccarino said on X that “fact-checking and moderation doesn’t belong in the hands of a few select gatekeepers who can easily inject their bias into decisions. It’s a democratic process that belongs in the hands of many.”
Also on X, Representative Jim Jordan, a Republican from Ohio and chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, praised Zuckerberg’s announcement as a “huge step in the right direction.”
“Social media, AI, and other technology companies must resist governments’ censorship pressure and instead work to ensure the open expression of ideas on their platforms,” Jordan posted. “We hope that other Big Tech companies, including Google, follow the lead of X and Meta in upholding freedom of speech online.”
Kate Starbird, a University of Washington professor of human-centered design and engineering, said on the social media site Bluesky that Meta’s decision will hamper people’s ability to find out the truth.
“One remaining concern for me is that even people who WANT to find accurate information are going to be challenged to do it, because we’re going to lose the groups that do this fact-checking work — unless non-profits step in to fill what is going to be a huge funding gap,” she posted.
Yoel Roth, a former head of Twitter’s trust and safety department, said on Bluesky that he was “genuinely baffled by the unempirical assertion that Community Notes ‘works.’ Does it? How do Meta know? The best available research is pretty mixed on this point.”
‘Too many mistakes’
In his statement Tuesday, Zuckerberg described a complex system of filters the company created to identify “legitimately bad stuff out there. Drugs, terrorism, child exploitation.”
But the systems, while well-intentioned, made mistakes, resulting in wrongly censored postings, he said.
“We’ve reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship,” he said.
The company will be “dialing back” content filters that scanned for policy violations with the goal to “dramatically reduce the amount of censorship on our platforms,” Zuckerberg said.
Joel Kaplan, Meta’s chief global affairs officer, said in a separate statement that “too much harmless content gets censored, too many people find themselves wrongly locked up in ‘Facebook jail,’ and we are often too slow to respond when they do.”
Biden ‘repeatedly pressured’
Without offering examples, Zuckerberg said in August that the U.S. government under the Biden administration pushed for censorship. In August, Zuckerberg said in a letter to Jordan that Biden officials “repeatedly pressured” Facebook to take down some COVID-19 content, including humor and satire.
“By going after us and other American companies, it has emboldened other governments to go even further,” Zuckerberg said Tuesday. “But now we have the opportunity to restore free expression, and I’m excited to take it.”
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