Mark Zuckerberg admitted that Meta and Facebook censored conservative opinions on an industrial scale, but has now vowed to make both sites beacons of free speech.
In a five-minute video message shared on his Facebook profile, the 40-year-old said: ‘We are going back to our roots and focusing on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies and restoring free speech to our platforms.
“More specifically, we will abolish fact-checkers and replace them with community notes similar to X, starting in the US.”
Like X, the shift will allow users on the sites to post messages that may be misleading and need more context.
Dressed in a black T-shirt, a gold pendant necklace and his limp curls, Zuckerberg pointed to the election as a major influence on this movement, and took a swipe at “governments and traditional media” for pushing for “more censoring ‘. .
He said the company would work to bring more political content back to users’ timelines and give them the ability to adjust how much of it they see.
The announcement comes at a time when fellow CEOs and business leaders are looking to curry favor with the new commander-in-chief, President-elect Donald Trump.
Dressed in a black T-shirt, a gold chain with pendant and his limp curls, Zuckerberg pointed to the election as a major influence
He said: “The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards reprioritizing speech.
“So we’re going back to our roots and focusing on reducing errors, simplifying our policies and restoring free speech on our platforms.
‘We’ve seen this approach work on to see.’
Zuckerberg added that the new approach was “less prone to bias” as a reason for the move.
Meta will also “simplify” its own policies to “remove a whole range of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are simply out of touch with mainstream discourse.”
The changes will affect Facebook and Instagram, two of the largest social media sites in the world with billions of users, as well as Threads.