Zuckerberg Says Meta ‘Restoring Free Speech,’ Will ‘Get Rid Of Fact-Checkers’

"What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas."

Leif Le Mahieu

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Tuesday that his company was implementing major changes to its censorship and fact-checking policies across all platforms, including Facebook and Instagram. 

David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images.

In a video posted on Facebook (Vídeo 👇), Zuckerberg said that Meta would no longer work with independent fact-checkers, end restrictions on topics like gender and immigration, and scale back filters that censored people for innocuous posts. Zuckerberg said that Meta would focus on ensuring free expression, saying that the recent election seemed like a “cultural tipping point.” 

“We’re going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies and restoring free expression on our platforms,” Zuckerberg said. “We’re going to get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with Community Notes similar to X, starting in the U.S.” 

He added that fact-checkers had become politically biased and untrustworthy. 

“After Trump first got elected in 2016, the legacy media wrote nonstop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy,” he said. “We tried in good faith to address those concerns without becoming the arbiters of truth. But the fact checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they created, especially in the U.S.”

Zuckerberg said restrictions on discussions on topics like immigration and gender were “out of touch with mainstream discourse.”

“What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas,” he said. 

Zuckerberg said that Meta would dial back its content filters to focus on illegal content and severe violations. He said this was a “trade off” that would lead to objectionable content being caught less often, but fewer people would be censored. 

He said Meta’s Trust and Safe and Content moderation teams would move from California to Texas. 

Zuckerberg said Meta would allow more political content to be shared and spread across its platforms after implementing policies that filtered political content from social media feeds. He noted that the Biden administration pushed Meta to censor content. 

“By going after us and other American companies, it has emboldened other governments to go even further,” he said. 

Zuckerberg said Meta would work with the incoming Trump administration to repel censorship abroad. 

“We’re going to work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world that are going after American companies and pushing to censor more,” he said. “The U.S. has the strongest constitutional protections for free expression in the world.”

Shortly after the presidential election, Trump met with Zuckerberg at Mar-a-Lago. Stephen Miller, Trump’s incoming deputy chief of staff for policy, said after the meeting that Zuckerberg “has been very clear about his desire to be a supporter of, and a participant in, this change we’re seeing all around America and the world, with this reform movement that Donald Trump is leading.”

Trump campaign advisor Alex Bruesewitz said Tuesday that he met with Joe Kaplan, head of public policy at Meta, on Monday to discuss the changes.

“We covered these topics as well as the need to reinstate MAGA supporters who were previously wrongly removed from their platforms under questionable circumstances,” he said. “I am hopeful that the measures will be implemented to reinstate these accounts.” 

Leif Le Mahieu, DailyWire.com, Jan 7, 2025 

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