Silicon Valley billionaires are scrambling to get into President-elect Donald Trump’s good graces ahead of his inauguration later this month, and no one has embarked on a more blatant boot-licking campaign than Meta CEO Mark Zuckerburg.
Meta has already donated $1 million dollars to Trump’s inaugural fund, and Zuckerberg flew to Mar-a-Lago to dine with the president-elect and members of his transition team shortly after his victory in November. This week, Zuckerberg escalated his overtures to Trump’s incoming administration, announcing the appointment of UFC CEO and MAGA diehard Dana White to the company’s board of directors, and releasing a video outlining major changes to Facebook’s fact checking policies.
On Tuesday, Zuckerberg announced in a video statement that Meta will be ending its fact-checking program in favor of a “Community Notes”-style approach to digital misinformation in an effort to combat “censorship” on its platforms. Community Notes, a user-powered fact-checking system implemented on X (formerly Twitter) after billionaire Elon Musk took over the platform, is itself deeply inconsistent and often riddled with misinformation.
“The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards, once again, prioritizing speech,” Zuckerberg said. “So we’re gonna get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies and restoring free expression on our platforms.”
Zuckerberg accused fact checkers of being “too politically biased,” and having “destroyed more trust than they’ve created, especially in the U.S.”
Meta, which boasts more than 3 billion global users across platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp, has long been criticized for its sloppy content policy enforcement. In March of last year, the company announced that it would deprioritize the recommendation of political content in its algorithms — a band-aid solution to the ever present scourge of political misinformation on social media.
Zuckerberg added on Tuesday that Meta would “get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse,” and instead focusing content violation enforcement on removing so called “high-severity violations”
The announcement came the day after Meta announced Trump-loving UFC honcho Dana White will join the company’s board of directors.
“I’ve never been interested in joining a board of directors until I got the offer to join Meta’s board. I am a huge believer that social media and AI are the future,” White said Monday in a statement released by Meta. “I am very excited to join this incredible team and to learn more about this business from the inside. There is nothing I love more than building brands, and I look forward to helping take Meta to the next level.” The famed fighter has been a central figure in Trump’s campaign, who spoke at the 2024 Republican National Convention, and was even handed the microphone by Trump during his election night victory speech.
If there were any doubts that the changing policies were meant to appease Trump, who just a few months ago threatened to jail Zuckerberg over accusations of election interference, newly minted Meta Chief of Global Affairs Joel Kaplan lauded the incoming president in an exclusive interview with Fox News on Tuesday morning.
There’s “no question that there has been a change over the last four years. We saw a lot of societal and political pressure, all in the direction of more content moderation, more censorship, and we’ve got a real opportunity,” Kaplan said. “Now, we’ve got a new administration, and a new president coming in who are big defenders of free expression, and that makes a difference.”
To consider Trump a staunch defender of free speech is to ignore the president-elect’s well-established pattern of targeting journalists and news networks who criticize him and his administration. Last month, Trump filed a lawsuit against The Des Moines Register and pollster Ann Selzer, who — for the first time in more than a decade — incorrectly predicted the outcome of Iowa’s presidential vote. In October, the president-elect kicked off a string of threats to strip broadcasters of their licenses over their critiques of him. During a November rally, held days before the election, Trump even told supporters that he wouldn’t “mind” if members of the media were killed during a hypothetical assassination attempt against him.
In his Tuesday interview, Kaplan added that Elon Musk, who now appears to be acting as a kind of unelected co-president, played “an incredibly important role in moving the debate and getting people refocused on free expression, and that’s been really constructive and productive.”
In his video statement Zuckerbeg claimed that the new policies would “help us build trust to do this work in places where there is less concern about the bias of our teams.” Whose trust is Zuckerberg hoping to gain? Well, he’ll be moving into the White House in a few weeks.
