Mark Zuckerberg announced major changes to Meta’s content-moderation policies on January 7th, signalling a shift toward less oversight and a return to prioritizing free speech. These moves align with the incoming Trump administration’s stance but could complicate Meta’s global operations and relationships with advertisers and content creators.
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From The Economist, published under licence. The original article can be found on www.economist.com
© 2024 The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved.
The Economist
He risks making enemies elsewhere ___STEADY_PAYWALL___
“It feels like we’re in a new era now,” said Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, as he announced sweeping changes to the firm’s social-media platforms in a video on January 7th. Two weeks ahead of Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration, Mr Zuckerberg outlined an overhaul of Meta’s content-moderation policy that meets many of the demands of American conservatives. The initiative says much about both the future of social media and the relationship between American business and government.
After building probably the world’s largest fact-checking operation, including hiring thousands of content moderators, Meta will stop attempting to verify the truth of posts on Facebook, Instagram and Threads, starting in America. Checking will instead be left to volunteers via “community notes”, a user-run system championed by X, a social network run by Elon Musk, an adviser to Mr Trump.
Meta will also “get rid of a bunch of restrictions” on hot topics such as immigration and gender, on which the firm’s existing rules “are just out of touch with mainstream discourse”, Mr Zuckerberg said. Automated filters will no longer weed out minor violations of Meta’s content rules; instead, such posts will be removed only if they attract a complaint from a user. In an accompanying blog, Meta said that 10-20% of the content that it has been removing until now has been taken down in error.
Mr Zuckerberg was frank about his rationale. “The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping-point towards once again prioritising speech,” he said. Meta is rejigging its team in a Trump-friendly fashion. Sir Nick Clegg, the firm’s liberal-leaning global-affairs chief, is to be replaced by Joel Kaplan, who worked in the White House under President George W. Bush. Dana White, a Trump ally and boss of Ultimate Fighting Championship, a martial-arts company, is to join Meta’s board. (So is John Elkann, CEO of Exor, which part-owns The Economist‘s parent company.)
Meta is not alone in currying favour with the incoming government. Tech bosses from Tim Cook to Sam Altman are said to have donated to Mr Trump’s inauguration fund ($1m appears to be the going rate). Amazon’s streaming studio has just spent a reported $40m on a flattering documentary about Mr Trump’s wife, Melania. Mr Trump has described Facebook as an “enemy of the people” and threatened to put Mr Zuckerberg in jail for “the rest of his life” if he interferes in elections. The firm also faces an antitrust trial in April that seeks to undo its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp.
Yet even before Mr Trump’s victory last year, Meta had begun to loosen its approach to moderation. Mr Zuckerberg, formerly a free-speech advocate, launched a crackdown on misinformation around five years ago, amid accusations of Russian interference in Mr Trump’s first election and an epidemic of harmful nonsense about covid-19. But lately it has been removing less content (see chart). Its rules on misinformation have also been relaxed. In 2023 Meta decided to allow ads falsely claiming that America’s election of 2020 had been “stolen”. Mr Zuckerberg was at pains to portray the latest changes as part of a return to business as usual, saying three times in his five-minute video that Meta was “getting back to our roots” on free speech.
The company will need to tread carefully. Mr Zuckerberg acknowledged that a more hands-off approach will mean more “bad stuff” on Meta’s platforms. That will not go down well with advertisers. X’s worldwide ad revenue fell by more than half during Mr Musk’s freewheeling first year in charge, estimates eMarketer, a research firm. And although users may like the sound of free speech, they may not enjoy its messy reality. X has lost more than a tenth of its users in America since Elon Musk took over, estimates eMarketer.
Loosening up on moderation will complicate Meta’s business abroad. The EU’s Digital Services Act obliges online platforms to limit the spread of misinformation, on pain of steep fines; suspending fact-checking there may prove impossible.
Mr Zuckerberg also promised a revival of “civic” content on Meta’s platforms. The company has spent years saying that users are bored and depressed by political news, even turning it off in countries such as Canada, where news publishers have demanded payment in return for their links being shared. If, as Mr Zuckerberg claims, users are once again in the market for more news in their newsfeed, Meta will not find it so easy to dismiss the demands of those publishers. Meta seems to be making progress in keeping Mr Trump and his friends happy. But its efforts may make relations with everyone else trickier.
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