Together with incoming President Donald Trump, Meta, the parent company of Instagram, Facebook and Threads, wants to fight European rules for social media. Meta will also, in an important concession to Trump and the Republicans, drastically scale down its own moderation of messages on its platforms.
Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced this on Tuesday in a video message on Facebook, which leaves no doubt about the direction chosen by the leadership of the influential social media company. A course that matches the wishes of future President Trump. The most important change is that the company is ceasing external fact checking and intends to filter much less stringently on controversial content – starting in the United States.
According to Zuckerberg, “censorship” on the platforms has gone too far in the past four years. After “the cultural turning point” of the presidential elections, the company must “return to its roots” and “prioritize free expression” again.
For Meta, which has more than three billion users around the world, reducing the supervision of expressions on the platforms is not only an important change of course. It also marks the end of a period that began after the 2016 presidential election.
Facebook received a lot of criticism that year because of the amount of misinformation (incorrect messages) and disinformation (intentionally incorrect messages) that was spread on the platform during the election campaign. In response, the company set up an extensive system of moderation, which will now be largely dismantled.
Big Tech smells opportunity
Zuckerberg’s announcement illustrates the opportunities that major American technology companies see in Donald Trump’s election victory. In all kinds of areas – from artificial intelligence to cryptocurrencies and social media – they want to avoid regulation in order, as they say, to give innovation free rein. The rules that the European Union has adopted – such as the Digital Services Act (DSA), the Digital Markets Act (DMA) and the Artificial Intelligence Act (AI Act) – are therefore a thorn in their side. Also because violation of these rules in Europe can lead to high fines.
For example, the DSA forces social media platforms to be transparent about, among other things, the operation of their algorithms. Another point of contention is that Europe does not want messages from European users on platforms such as Instagram and Facebook to be used for training artificial intelligence.
“Together with President Trump, we will push back against governments around the world that are going after American companies and seeking to censor more,” Zuckerberg said. “Europe has an ever-growing number of laws that institutionalize censorship and make it difficult to build anything innovative there.”
In recent years, Republicans have systematically accused the moderation of Facebook and other platforms as censorship. Trump himself was temporarily banned from Facebook, YouTube and Twitter in 2021 after inciting his supporters to storm the Capitol. Since then he has regularly spoken of a “censorship cartel”. The man Trump has appointed to lead the telecommunications, radio, television and internet regulator (FCC), Brendan Carr, also says he sees “dismantling the censorship cartel” as his main mission.
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Taking a jab at President Biden, Zuckerberg said it has been difficult to guarantee free speech on the platforms in recent years because “even the current US administration pushed for censorship.”
In his book Save America Last year, Trump accused Zuckerberg of challenging Facebook against his re-election in 2020. If he did something like that again in 2024, Trump threatened, “he will spend the rest of his life in prison.”
Since then, Zuckerberg has repeatedly taken steps to repair relations with Trump and Republicans, including before the election. This summer, in a letter to the Republican chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, he pledged that he and his wife would no longer donate money to initiatives to improve access to polling places in underserved areas — which Republicans say is a veiled support for the Democrats are. He expressed regret about the overly strict moderation during the corona pandemic.
Zuckerberg recently visited Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort to have dinner with the president-elect, after which he donated $1 million to the fund for his inauguration. Last week he replaced the progressive Nick Clegg (former British Deputy Prime Minister on behalf of the LibDems) as head of Global Affairs by the conservative Trump supporter Joel Kaplan. And this week he brought Dana White – Trump friend, former boxing promoter and chairman of the major combat sports organization UFC – onto Meta’s supervisory board.
Musk: ‘This is cool’
Meta will now stop using external fact checkers and moderators. To date, the company has used information from major international news agencies to combat the spread of misinformation. In addition, Meta uses digital systems that can identify incorrect content and prevent its rapid spread. There has been too much political bias in its use, Zuckerberg now says. He mentions discussions about migration and gender as examples, in which Meta out of touch would have been affected by the way people think about this now. The systems should still be used for, among other things, detecting child abuse images.
Following X’s example, Meta’s social media users now take the lead in moderation. They can add labels to messages that they think are wrong. At X these are so-called community noteswhich, if they meet certain conditions, can be placed under a message on X stating that the above is incorrect or incomplete.
Elon Musk, who also largely abolished moderation on that platform when he took over Twitter, responded to Zuckerberg’s announcement on X with the words “This is cool.”
Meta’s department that deals with reviewing and removing messages must also move. She is now in California, which is considered left-wing and liberal, and support for the Democrats is high there. The team has to go to Texas, which is more conservative and where Musk also has his base.
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