Mark Zuckerberg Rushes to Beat Elon Musk at Sucking up to Trump
It’s official: Mark Zuckerberg is turning Meta into yet another propaganda machine for Donald Trump and the far right.
In a video statement published Tuesday, Zuckerberg announced that Meta would be enacting a series of policy changes purportedly for the purpose of fostering free speech, but his declaration devolved into an explanation of just how spineless he intends to be in the face of a second Trump administration.
As reasons for allowing more unfettered speech, Zuckerberg declared that “it’s time to get back to our roots around free expression on Facebook and Instagram,” and that there has been “widespread debate about potential harms from online content. Governments and legacy media have pushed to censor more and more.”
He announced that Meta will end its third-party fact-checking program in favor of community notes. “We’ve reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes, and too much censorship,” Zuckberg said.
He also made sure to flag that his decision was a direct response to Trump’s return to the White House. “The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point toward prioritizing speech,” he said.
“After Trump first got elected in 2016, the legacy media wrote nonstop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy,” Zuckerberg continued. “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.”
In a statement, Meta referred specifically to Elon Musk’s X, which has essentially become an unusable cesspool of misinformation and hate speech, as an example of the triumph of community notes.
“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,” the statement said.
Zuckerberg also declared that Meta would “get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender, which are just out of touch with mainstream discourse.”
His specific reference to these two “topics,” which encompass vulnerable communities often targeted by Trump and other conservatives, signals his complete submission to the far right’s mission to steer public discourse straight into hell. As if the repeated references to the dangers of “legacy media” didn’t indicate that strongly enough.
Zuckerberg’s statement also demonstrates a willful ignorance of the way misinformation and hate speech about these issues endanger the lives of people offline for the sake of fostering conversation about whether all people should have the rights and dignities of others. Over the summer, Trump’s racist lies about pet-eating immigrants spread across the internet ecosystem like wildfire, and even though they weren’t based on anything at all, they were treated as if they were as worthy as any actual reporting about immigration. This is the kind of internet Zuckerberg said he hopes to foster.
“What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions; shut down people with different ideas,” he said in his video message.
Zuckerberg also said he would be changing enforcement measures, relying on users to report potentially harmful content before it could be addressed, and “dialing back” content filters.
“It means we’re gonna catch less bad stuff,” Zuckerberg said. “But it will also reduce the number of innocent [people’s] posts and accounts that we accidentally take down.”
It remains to be seen if allowing more content will extend to LGBTQ-related hashtags, which Meta has reportedly restricted for months.
Zuckerberg spoke openly about hiding political content from users during the election season “because it was making people stressed.” But now that an authoritarian is coming into power, it seems the billionaire has changed his tune. “It feels like we’re in a new era now,” Zuckerberg explained, saying that “civic content” would be phased back in across Meta’s platforms.
During an appearance Tuesday on Fox & Friends, Meta policy chief Joel Kaplan made it clear that the decision to roll back restrictions was a direct response to Trump. “There is a real opportunity here, with President Trump coming into office, with his commitment to free expression, for us to get back to those values,” he said.
Zuckerberg’s feckless kowtowing comes one day after Meta announced that UFC CEO Dana White, one of Trump’s close allies, would be joining the company’s board of directors.