Facebook and Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg has signalled an end to censorious policies and a move toward pushing for free speech abroad.
In a five-minute video released on social media, Zuckerberg announced an end to fact-checkers and a shift toward X-style community notes. He said the plan is to change the way content is restricted and promoted to defend free expression.
He also committed to working with the incoming Trump administration to defend free speech on Meta platforms internationally.
“It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression on Facebook and Instagram,” Zuckerberg said. “I gave a speech at Georgetown five years ago about the importance of protecting free expression, and I still believe this today, but a lot has happened over the last several years.”
He said things like the proliferation of drugs, terrorism and child exploitation are still a high priority to be removed from the platform but that Meta will be stepping back from censoring public discourse.
“We built a lot of complex systems to moderate content, but the problem with complex systems is they make mistakes,” he said. “Even if they accidentally censor just 1% of posts, that’s millions of people, and we’ve reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship.”
He said the recent election of Donald Trump is a “cultural tipping point” towards prioritizing free discourse.
“So we’re going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies and restoring free expression on our platforms,” he said.
Zuckerberg said Meta will replace fact checkers with community notes in the style of his social media competitor Elon Musk’s community notes on X.
“After Trump first got elected in 2016, the legacy media wrote nonstop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy. We tried, in good faith, to address those concerns without becoming the arbiters of truth,” he said. “But the fact-checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created, especially in the US.”
Meta will also be removing restrictions on topics such as immigration and gender, as Zuckerberg said they have become out of touch with mainstream discourse.
“What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas, and it’s gone too far,” he said. “So I want to make sure that people can share their beliefs and experiences on our platforms.”
He said Meta will change how they filter content, too, to limit mistakes and “dramatically reduce the amount of censorship” on Meta platforms. He said the filters would be focused on illegal and “high severity violations” while relying on individual reporting for “lower severity” ones and require much “higher confidence” before taking posts down.
“The reality is that this is a trade-off. It means we’re going to catch less bad stuff, but we’ll also reduce the number of innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally take down,” he said.
He also noted that they would reverse a previous decision not to recommend political content to users initially because it was “making people stressed.”
He announced he would partner with President-elect Donald Trump’s future government to push back against governments worldwide, such as European and Latin American countries who aim to censor free discourse on his platforms.
E-law professor and expert Michael Geist told True North that this partnership could potentially impact Trudeau government censorship bills such as the Online News Act and the Online Streaming Act.
“I think we will see increased pressure to change those bills. For example, Bill C-18 (Online News Act) has already led to the blocking of news links in Canada on the Meta platforms,” he said. “Meta will no doubt continue to fight against that law.”
The Online News Act makes social media giants such as Meta have to pay certain Canadian media outlets to have their news available on their websites. Zuckerberg pushed back against the law by banning news on Instagram and Facebook in Canada. The ban is still in place.
Geist said the US government under Trump could accelerate the fight against such bills, though reforms may be inevitable if there is a change in government in Canada.
“The language used by Zuckerberg is certainly consistent with the kind of concerns voiced by Pierre Poilievre over the past couple of years,” Geist said.
Meta did not respond to True North’s requests for comment.