BREAKING: Facebook ditches ‘fact-checkers,’ restores free speech ‘roots,’ to work with Trump to fight global censorship

Zuckerberg recently met with President-elect Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago and, in his Instagram video announcing the changes, he said that Trump's win indicated that a new direction was necessary at Facebook.

Zuckerberg announced that he'd be relocating the content moderation team from California to Texas and would work with Trump to fight global censorship. The new changes on the platform are only slated for the United States so far. In recent months, Zuckerberg lambasted government censorship and interference in his platform, vowed to stop giving political donations to Democrats, and changed his political affiliation to Independent.

"We're gonna get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies and restoring free expression on our platforms," Zuckerberg announced in a video. "More specifically, here's what we're going to do. First, we're going to get rid of fact checkers and replace them with community notes similar to X, starting in the U.S."

"The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards, once again, prioritizing speech," he added. "So we're gonna get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies and restoring free expression on our platforms."

He said that because of the complex system of fact-checking and content moderation that has been in place, there have been too many “mistakes” on censoring people’s posts. The new plan is to work to suppress actually harmful content, not political speech or perspectives. To that end, he said that the recent move to suppress political speech on the platforms, which he said was at the request of users, will be removed and that kind of speech will again be permitted.

The content he said that Meta will focus on for moderation are “illegal and high-severity violations.” He added, “For lower-severity violations, we're going to rely on someone reporting an issue before we take action.”

Zuckerberg also spoke about working with the Trump administration to fight for more free speech around the globe and added, “We're going to work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world that are going after American companies and pushing to censor more.”

The move from Zuckerberg may be in response to what he said happened to the company under the Biden-Harris administration. The CEO himself said last summer that the US government had pressured Meta to take down and censor posts about Covid-19.

In August 2024, Zuckerberg penned a letter to Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-OH), in which he wrote, "In 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn't agree."

Ultimately," he added in the letter, "it was our decision whether or not to take content down, and we own our decisions, including COVID-19 related changes we made to our enforcement in the wake of this pressure. I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it."