Mark Zuckerberg has been on a tear since Donald Trump won the 2024 election. With visits to Mar-a-Lago and bringing pro-Trump cronies onto Meta’s board, Zuckerberg appears to be saying, let ‘er rip. In a video announcement on Tuesday, Zuckerberg claimed that Meta’s third-party fact-checkers were “too politically biased,” and that Meta would be moving its content moderation operation from California to Texas (a famously apolitical state, definitely not at the forefront of anti-trans extremism). Meta’s new global policy head, Republican lobbyist Joel Kaplan, pointed to Elon Musk’s changes to Twitter/X’s community notes system as the model that Meta would be moving towards.
I never thought I’d long for the days where Musk and Zuckerberg were talking about beating the crap out of each other. But watching the second Trump administration kick off with corporations from Meta to Disney to Apple to ABC kissing the ring, that memory feels quaint.
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Zuckerberg acknowledged upfront that this policy change would result in “trade-offs,” meaning they’ll “catch less bad stuff,” per the New York Times. But just last week, WIRED reported that Instagram and Facebook have been hosting ads for DIY gun silencers advertised as “fuel filters,” which can be a felony. (The company told WIRED it removed the ads and associated accounts after the publication flagged them.) A year ago, Meta caught attention for its suppression of political content, which they attributed in part to the difficulty of content moderation. With today’s announcement, the move seems intended to, as the New York Times put it, “[allow Meta] to step back from politically loaded decisions about what content to take down.”
Conservatives took the news as validation for all their complaints about “censorship,” though one 2024 study published in the journal Nature found that, while right-wingers are suspended more than liberals online, that’s because they’re more often found to be spreading misinformation or otherwise dubious sources. Meanwhile, the actual censorship going on within Meta’s platforms? Just yesterday, as reported by Taylor Lorenz, it came out that Meta was suppressing LGBTQ+ content on Instagram from young users who may have actively sought it out, which the company is calling a mistake.
Then there’s the fact that the company’s purported interest in “free speech” doesn’t necessarily seem to always extend to its own staffers. According to 404 Media, Meta employees who complained about the appointment of Trump supporter and UFC president Dana White to Meta’s board saw their criticisms deleted. (The company did something similar in the wake of the Dobbs ruling in 2022 that led to the overturning of Roe v. Wade.) Among the deleted messages included mention of the fact that White was caught on video in 2023 slapping his wife, behavior which he admitted to and said was wrong.
