Mark Zuckerberg admitted 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 to his Facebook profile, the 40-year-old said: ‘We’re going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies and restoring free expression on our platforms.
‘More specifically, we’re going to get rid of 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 call out posts that are potentially misleading and need more context.
Wearing a black t-shirt, a gold chain with a pendant and his floppy curls, Zuckerberg pointed to the election as being a major influence in the move, and took a shot at ‘governments and legacy media’ for pushing to ‘censor more’.
He said the company would work to bring more political content back to the timeline of users and give them the option to customize how much they see of it.
The announcement comes as fellow CEOs and business leaders look to curry favor with incoming commander-in-chief President-elect Donald Trump.
Wearing a black t-shirt, a gold chain with a pendant and his floppy curls, Zuckerberg pointed to the election as being a major influence
He said: ‘The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech.
‘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.
‘We’ve seen this approach work on X where they empower their community to decide when posts are potentially misleading and need more context, and people across a diverse range of perspectives decide what sort of context is helpful for other users to see.’
Zuckerberg added that the new approach was ‘less prone to bias’ as a reason for the move.
Meta will also ‘simplify’ its owns policies to ‘get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse’.
The changes will affect Facebook and Instagram, two of the largest social media sites in the world that boast billions of users, as well as Threads.
