[Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is making significant changes to the company’s content moderation policies, which are seen as a response to the desires of President-elect Donald Trump and his supporters. The changes include relaxing rules for posting conservative opinions, getting rid of fact-checkers, and moving towards a more permissive system for posting content.
Zuckerberg justified the changes by saying that the recent elections felt like a “cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech.” He also repeated a right-wing talking point used to undermine fact-checking, saying that governments and legacy media have pushed to censor more and more.
The changes will likely have a significant impact on the internet, as Meta is a dominant force in the industry with billions of users on its platforms worldwide. The company’s newly promoted policy chief, Joel Kaplan, has been a vocal critic of fact-checking and has appeared on Fox News to discuss the changes.
Trump and some of his allies have been critical of Zuckerberg and Facebook in the past, and Meta has business before the US government, including an antitrust case against the company. The changes are seen as an attempt to appeal to the incoming administration.
The company will also scrap its partnerships with third-party fact-checking groups and move towards an X-style “community notes” system instead. Zuckerberg asserted that fact-checkers have been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created, especially in the US.
The changes have been met with cheers from conservatives and warnings from misinformation experts, who say that the platforms will become even more of a cesspool. The changes will also likely lead to layoffs at some news outlets, as Facebook and Google are major funders of fact-checking outlets around the world.
Zuckerberg also announced that the company will “bring back civic content,” meaning that users will see more posts about elections, politics, and social issues. The company will take a more “personalized approach” to allow users who want more political content to see it in their feeds.
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