BREAKING: Meta Announces Reduced Censorship and Elimination of

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Alternate headline: “Trump and Musk Win Again!”

Just a few minutes ago, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta is changing its policies fairly radically to reduce the amount of censorship.

In recent years we’ve developed increasingly complex systems to manage content across our platforms, partly in response to societal and political pressure to moderate content. This approach has gone too far. As well-intentioned as many of these efforts have been, they have expanded over time to the point where we are making too many mistakes, frustrating our users and too often getting in the way of the free expression we set out to enable.

Zuckerberg continues:

We want to fix that and return to that fundamental commitment to free expression. Today, we’re making some changes to stay true to that ideal.

Within minutes of the announcement, Meta’s Chief Global Affairs Officer Joel Kaplan was on Fox and Friends — Fox News! — to discuss it. (This seems pretty significant in itself. They sent their “Chief Global Affairs Officer” — is that a name for “head PR flack?” — into the very belly of the Trumpian beast to discuss the changes. Zuckerberg’s meeting with Trump must have been a real “come to Jesus” moment.)

Watch the whole video, but here are some high points.

Kaplan says, “When you have a U.S. Administration pushing for censorship, it just makes it open season for other countries around the world…” Kaplan goes on to say that one of the areas in which Meta and Facebook got a lot of pressure was COVID, in particular.

I think the really interesting and significant part is that Facebook is ending its dependence on “independent fact checkers,” because they found that the independent fact checkers were too politically biased. Zuckerberg says:

Too much harmless content gets censored, too many people find themselves wrongly locked up in “Facebook jail,” and we are often too slow to respond when they do.

Instead, they’ll be implementing “Community Notes,” which are explicitly modeled on the Community Notes feature on X.

It won’t be a complete free-for-all. The announcement says:

We will allow more speech by lifting restrictions on some topics that are part of mainstream discourse and focusing our enforcement on illegal and high-severity violations.

They will also be adding features to Instagram, like a specific account type for teen users that has to be approved by their parents.

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As I said, I think the title could be “Musk and Trump Win!” Or even “Elections Have Consequences!” Kaplan says explicitly that Facebook feels more free to make these changes because the incoming administration has actually expressed a commitment to freedom of speech and freedom of expression.

It looks like the pressure in support of free expression is spreading. As I wrote just the other day, Google’s ad policies explicitly censor conservative topics, like gun rights. Will they feel the heat, too?

In the meantime, we should be pressing both Congress and the Trump Administration to codify these things into law. The Biden Administration had too much power to say “Nice business you have there. Be a shame if something happened to it.”