Mark Zuckerberg in Facebook video
Mark Zuckerberg has bent the knee to Donald Trump, so to speak, as he has given up on trying to prevent the proliferation of fake news on Facebook. Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram announced on Tuesday that it was reversing its policy on content review, ending its third party fact-checking program.
In a video message posted on Facebook Tuesday, Mark Zuckerberg said Facebook had been guilty of “too much censorship” and that it would “restore free expression.”
Zuckerberg said that Facebook was changing its policy in response to the results of the 2024 elections which he said constituted a “cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech.”
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“We will end the current third party fact checking program in the United States and instead begin moving to a Community Notes program,” said Joel Kaplan, Meta’s Chief Global Affairs Officer in a statement. “We’ve seen this approach work on X – where they empower their community to decide when posts are potentially misleading and need more context, and people across a diverse range of perspectives decide what sort of context is helpful for other users to see. We think this could be a better way of achieving our original intention of providing people with information about what they’re seeing – and one that’s less prone to bias.”
Kaplan went on to say that this move was being made because Meta saw that the policies on content that it had implemented over the past eight years had failed to achieve their goals saying, “Over time we ended up with too much content being fact checked that people would understand to be legitimate political speech and debate.”
However, many are seeing this as more of a cowing to pressure from Donald Trump rather than a move based on a genuine response to public demands.
To put all of this in perspective, the reason that Facebook implemented its content review policies in the first place was that its platform allowed the proliferation of a stream of false news about Hilary Clinton and other democrats that helped to promote Donald Trump’s presidential bid that year. And much of this came from Donald Trump himself and his supporters.
And Mark Zuckerberg had been a supporter of democrats before the 2024 elections and no friend of Donald Trump’s. Now, however, Zuckerberg appears to have been cowed by Trump and is trying to curry favor with the soon to be once again president. This is because Donald Trump made no secret of the fact that should he return to office he would go after companies like Meta that he claims censored him.
