Mark Zuckerberg’s beautiful censorship admission as he seeks to suck-up to Trump
Mark Zuckerberg admitted Meta and Facebook censored conservative opinions on an industrial scale but has now vowed to make both sites beacons of free speech.
In a five minute video message shared to his Facebook profile, the 40-year-old said: ‘We’re going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies and restoring free expression on our platforms.
‘More specifically, we’re going to get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with community notes similar to X, starting in the US.’
Like X, the shift will allow users on the sites to call out posts that are potentially misleading and need more context.
Wearing a black t-shirt, a gold chain with a pendant and his floppy curls, Zuckerberg pointed to the election as being a major influence in the move, and took a shot at ‘governments and legacy media’ for pushing to ‘censor more’.
He said the company would work to bring more political content back to the timeline of users and give them the option to customize how much they see of it.
The announcement comes as fellow CEOs and business leaders look to curry favor with incoming commander-in-chief President-elect Donald Trump.
Wearing a black t-shirt, a gold chain with a pendant and his floppy curls, Zuckerberg pointed to the election as being a major influence
Zuckerberg said the company would work to bring more political content back to the timeline of users and give them the option to customize how much they see of it
Trump and Zuckerberg are seen here meeting inside the Oval Office in September of 2019
He said: ‘The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech.
‘So we’re going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies, and restoring free expression on our platforms.
‘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.’
Zuckerberg added that the new approach was ‘less prone to bias’ as a reason for the move.
Meta will also ‘simplify’ its owns policies to ‘get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse’.
The changes will affect Facebook and Instagram, two of the largest social media sites in the world that boast billions of users, as well as Threads.
Since sharing the policy shift on Tuesday morning, social media users have been reacting to the news with split opinions.
One person posted: ‘Zuckerberg has fully switched teams. It’s a very big deal. He oversees 60%+ of US social media. What triggered this?’
Conservative provocateur Ben Shapiro added: ‘This is a sea change in the direction at Facebook.
‘Zuckerberg spelled out his vision of free speech at Georgetown in 2019, to the consternation and shock of the Left; Facebook then proceeded to cave, engaging in mass censorship. The tide has turned. Good for Zuckerberg.’
Since sharing the policy shift on Tuesday morning, social media users have been reacting to the news with split opinions
Trump slammed Facebook in July after this image of him covered in blood following the assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, was mistakenly censored by the social media platform
One other posted: ‘He’s a human weathervane. The wind blows one way, that’s what he says. The wind changes direction, now he says that.’
Zuckerberg recently donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund, in a complete reversal on past relations between the two.
The policy change, and the donation come after Zuckerberg sat down with the President-elect for dinner in Mar-a-Lago in November.
On Monday, Zuckerberg added Dana White to Meta’s board of directors in another olive branch to Trump.
Last week, Meta also named Joel Kaplan, an executive with deep GOP connections, as its president of global affairs.
Speaking on Fox News on Tuesday morning, Kaplan said that societal shifts in the last four years had brought about the change.
He said: ‘Well, there’s no question that the things that happened at Meta are coming from Mark.
‘But there’s also 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, 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.’
Last week, Meta named Joel Kaplan, an executive with deep GOP connections, as its president of global affairs. Him and Zuckerberg are seen here in 2019 when he was VP of Global Policy
Speaking on Fox News on Tuesday morning, Kaplan said that societal shifts in last four years had brought about the change
Kaplan also said the company would be working closely with President-elect Trump moving forward to protect the First Amendment and US companies.
He added: ‘One of the things we’ve experienced is that when you have a U.S. president administration that’s pushing for censorship, it just makes it open season for other governments around the world that don’t even have the protections of the First Amendment to really put pressure on U.S. companies.
‘We’re going to work with President Trump to push back on that kind of thing around the world.’
Trump has long been critical of Meta for alleged instances of politically biased censorship against Republicans and conservatives.
Trump once supported a repeal of Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which provides legal immunity to social media companies over what its users post.
If it were repealed, this would open the door for anyone to sue social media companies like Meta for controversial content on their sites. Lawsuits could also target attempts to moderate such content.
Following the January 6 insurrection four years ago, Trump was suspended from Facebook for two years.
He was reinstated on the platform in 2023 months after Trump announced his third run for the White House, which was ultimately successful.
By July 2024, Meta fully removed all suspension penalties from Trump’s accounts on Facebook and Instagram, citing the public’s need to hear from nominees for president.
The move will see Meta align itself with X. Owner of X Elon Musk is seen here alongside Trump in October of last year
Meta will also ‘simplify’ its owns policies to ‘get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse’
On Monday, Zuckerberg added Dana White to Meta’s board of directors in another olive branch to Trump
Trump’s latest gripe with Meta came in July, after Facebook admitted they mistakenly censored an image of him with blood running down his ear after he was shot at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.
‘Facebook has just admitted that it wrongly censored the Trump “attempted assassination photo,” and got caught,’ Trump posted on social media at the time.
‘Same thing for Google,’ he claimed. ‘They made it virtually impossible to find pictures or anything about this heinous act. Both are facing big backlash over censorship claims.’
In August of last year Zuckerberg admitted that the Biden administration had demanded Facebook censor what they called ‘COVID misinformation’.
He said in a letter to the House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan that they’ll fight back against any attempts at censorship in the future and also admitted the company had ‘demoted’ stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop.
He wrote that the White House ‘repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree’.
He said that this pressure ‘was wrong’ and says he regrets ‘that we were not more outspoken about it’.
‘We made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today,’ he added.
