In some sweeping changes that will significantly alter the way that posts, videos and other content are moderated online, Meta will adjust its content review policies on Facebook and Instagram, getting rid of fact checkers and replacing them with user-generated “community notes,” similar to Elon Musk’s X, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Tuesday.
The changes come just before President-elect Donald Trump is set to take office. Trump and other Republicans have lambasted Zuckerberg and Meta for what they view as censorship of right-wing voices.
“Fact checkers have been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created,” Zuckerberg said in a video announcing the new policy Tuesday. “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.”
However, Zuckerberg acknowledged a “tradeoff” in the new policy, noting that more harmful content will appear on the platform due to the content moderation changes.
Meta’s newly appointed Chief of Global Affairs, Joel Kaplan, told Fox on Tuesday that Meta’s partnerships with third-party fact-checkers were “well-intentioned at the outset, but there’s just been too much political bias in what they choose to fact check and how.”
The announcement comes amid a broader apparent ideological shift to the right within Meta’s top ranks. Zuckerberg seeks to improve his relationship with Trump before the president-elect takes office later this month. Just one day earlier, Meta announced that Trump ally and UFC CEO Dana White, along with two other new directors, would join its board. Meta has also said it will donate $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund, and that Zuckerberg wants to take an “active role” in tech policy discussions.
Kaplan, a prominent Republican elevated to the company’s top policy job last week, acknowledged that the Tuesday announcement is directly related to the changing administration.
He said there’s “no question that there has been a change over the last four years. We saw a lot of societal and political pressure, all in the direction of more content moderation and more censorship, and we’ve got a real opportunity. Now, we’ve got a new administration and a new president coming in who are big defenders of free expression, and that makes a difference.”
Meta gave Trump’s team an advanced heads up that the moderation policy change was coming, a source familiar with the conversation told CNN.
