Misguided decisions and the superiority of crowdsourcing mean Zuckerberg was right to change direction. But he must also keep Trump at arm’s length.
By Jacob Mchangama
The Great American Vibe Shift, rapidly reshaping U.S. culture and politics, has landed at 1 Hacker Way—the gleaming Palo Alto headquarters of Meta. In a video this week, Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced sweeping changes to content policies on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads to enhance free expression and reduce censorship. Key changes include phasing out third-party fact-checking in the United States in favor of crowdsourced fact-checking, similar to X’s Community Notes feature, which allows users to add context to misleading posts. Zuckerberg also pledged to loosen restrictions on “hate speech” and to limit automated filtering to “illegal and high-severity violations” (users will have to flag “lower-severity violations” for review). Zuckerberg also pledged to work closely with the upcoming Trump administration to resist foreign censorship.
The reaction to Zuckerberg’s announcement has been predictably alarmist in traditional media among tech reporters and the sprawling ecosystem of nonprofits dedicated to fighting disinformation and hate speech. Headlines such as “Meta is Not Returning to its Free Speech Origins – It’s Preparing for an Autocratic Future” and “Meta surrenders to the right on speech: ‘I really think this a precursor for genocide,’ a former employee tells Platformer” give you a flavor of the dominant takes. Even international free speech organizations have condemned the move.
There are certainly reasons to be cynical of the timing of and motivation behind Zuckerberg’s announcement, which seems carefully designed to placate and curry favor with the incoming Trump administration. Trump after all threatened Zuckerberg with prison and has long claimed that Big Tech—not least Facebook—has an anti-conservative agenda censoring people on the right.
Yet, if we set aside the political maneuvering and corporate self-preservation behind Zuckerberg’s pivot, the announced policy changes represent a promising shift that could significantly enhance the practical exercise of online free speech. The benefits, however, hinge on Meta resisting co-optation by the very political movement these policies appear designed to appease.
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Jacob Mchangama is the Founder and Executive Director of The Future of Free Speech. He is also a research professor at Vanderbilt University and a Senior Fellow at The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE).