Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Facebook has done “too much censorship” as he revealed the social network is scrapping fact-checking and restrictions on free speech as President-elect Donald Trump prepares to return to the White House.
The 40-year-old tech tycoon — who dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago the day before Thanksgiving and gave him a pair of Meta Ray Ban sunglasses, with Meta later donating $1 million to his inaugural fund — claimed on Tuesday that the dramatic about-face was signal that the company is returning to an original focus on free speech.
“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 in a video on Tuesday, noting that Facebook will end its controversial third-party fact-checking in favor of adopting Elon Musk’s crowd-sourced “Community Notes” model on X.
The stunning reversal will include moving Meta’s content moderation team from deep-blue California to right-leaning Texas in order to insulate the group from cultural bias — a move that looked like another page out of Musk’s playbook.
“As we work to promote free expression, I think that will help build trust to do this work in places where there’s less concern about the bias of our team,” the Meta boss said.
Facebook will do away with “restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse,” Zuckerberg said.
“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, adding: “It’s gone too far.”
House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) — who previously has overseen Meta probes including over Facebook’s collusion with the FBI to debunk reports on Hunter Biden’s laptop before the 2020 election — praised Zuckerberg on Tuesday and urged other Big Tech firms such as Google to follow suit.
“Last August, Zuckerberg admitted to our committee that the Biden White House had pressured Facebook to censor Americans,” Jordan told The Post. “Today is a huge step in the right direction.”
Relations between Jordan and Zuckerberg have warmed of late. In August, Zuckerberg sent a letter to Jordan saying that the Biden administration was wrong to pressure Facebook to censor COVID-related content in 2021, including memes, satire and jokes, and said it wouldn’t comply with such efforts in the future.
Meta is working to court other influential figures in Trump’s inner circle. The company announced on Monday that it appointed three new members to its board of directors, including Dana White, the president and CEO of Ultimate Fighting Championship who frequently appeared alongside Trump during the campaign.
Joel Kaplan, a former aide to President George W. Bush who was named Meta’s chief global affairs officer last week, told Fox News on Tuesday that “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.”
Tuesday’s announcement marks a drastic shift away from Facebook’s long-antagonistic stance toward Trump. In January 2021, Facebook banned Trump in the wake of the rioting at the US Capitol. Two years later, Meta reinstated Trump’s Facebook account.
This summer, Trump threatened Zuckerberg with jail time after the Meta CEO and his wife donated hundreds of millions of dollars to support election infrastructure in 2020.
In the weeks and months leading up to the 2020 presidential election, Facebook had limited distribution of The Post’s revelations about the Hunter Biden laptop.
Zuckerberg has admitted in interviews that the decision was made after the FBI gave a warning about potential foreign interference in the election. The Meta CEO said he regretted the move.
In late July, Facebook acknowledged that it censored the image of President-elect Donald Trump raising his fist in the immediate aftermath of the assassination attempt in Pennsylvania.
Zuckerberg on Tuesday hit out at “legacy media” for restricting debate about hot-button issues such as “gender and immigration” – topics that will now be more freely discussed on Meta platforms including Facebook and Instagram.
Meta said it will “allow more speech by lifting restrictions on some topics that are part of mainstream discourse” while “focusing our enforcement on illegal and high-severity violations.”
Zuckerberg also said he wants to partner with Trump “to push back on government around the world that are going after American companies and censor Americans more.” He specifically mentioned Europe, where there are “an increasing number of laws…that make it difficult to build anything innovative over there.”
“Governments and legacy media have pushed to censor more and more,” Zuckerberg said in a video message announcing the change, adding: “A lot of this is clearly political.”
The Facebook founder said that his company has “built a lot of complex systems to moderate content.”
“But the problem with complex systems is that they make mistakes,” the billionaire tech mogul said.
“Even if they accidentally censor just 1% of posts, that is millions of people,” according to Zuckerberg. “And we’ve reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship.”
The Meta CEO noted that after Trump was elected in 2016, “the legacy media wrote nonstop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy.”
“We tried in good faith to address those concerns without becoming the arbiters of truth,” Zuckerberg said.
He admitted that the third party fact-checkers relied on by Facebook “have been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they created.”
Zuckerberg said that Facebook will “phase in a more comprehensive Community Note system” over the next couple of months.
Zuckerberg said he wants to ensure that Facebook and Instagram users “can share their beliefs and experiences.”
The mogul said Meta will “focus” its content moderation “filters” on “tackling illegal and high-severity violations.”
“Filters make mistakes and they take down a lot of content they shouldn’t,” Zuckerberg said. “So by dialing them back, we’re going to dramatically reduce the amount of censorship on our platforms.”
