In a five-minute speech that was posted overnight, Mark Zuckerberg announced a libertarian shift to take place on Meta platforms Instagram and Facebook. In the speech Zuckerberg came out strongly against what he perceived as Washington’s censorship of tech platforms, saying that “governments and legacy media have pushed to censor more and more.”
“After Trump first got elected in 2016, the legacy media wrote non-stop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy,” said Zuckerberg. “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 have created, especially in the US.”
Meta will now be implementing a “community notes” policy instead. As on Twitter/X, this allows users to attach corrections to posts they take issue with, which if rated helpful by other users eventually become attached to the original post. Meta platforms formerly auto-blocked posts if computerised text analysis deemed them discriminatory.
But this is not just about less restrictions but also about removing specific restrictions. “We’re going to…get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out-of-touch with mainstream discourse,” said Zuckerberg. “What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas, and it’s gone too far.”
He added that Trump’s election “feel[s] like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritising speech.”
Meta will still attempt to block illegal content policy violations. Its team tasked with doing so will be moving from California to Texas.
Zuckberg has previously remained mute on the US political shift that is underway. Last night’s announcement is perhaps best understood as Meta bending the knee to the incoming Trump administration.
Australian social media users can expect to be seeing less civil content on immigration and gender moving forward. More broadly, it appears the sentiment represented by Trump is not a 2016 aberration but is putting down roots.
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