Mark Zuckerberg’s stunning censorship admission as he seeks to suck-up to Trump
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
Zuckerberg said the company would work to bring more political content back to users’ timeline and give them the ability to adjust how much of it they see
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.
Zuckerberg also recently donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund, which is a complete reversal of previous relations between the two.
Meta did not donate to either Trump’s 2017 inaugural fund or Joe Biden’s 2021 fund.
The policy change and donation came after Zuckerberg sat down with the president-elect for dinner at Mar-a-Lago in November.
Trump and Zuckerberg meet here in the Oval Office in September 2019
On Monday, Zuckerberg added Dana White to Meta’s board of directors, in a different olive branch from Trump.
Last week, Meta also named Joel Kaplan, an executive with deep GOP connections, as policy chief.
Trump has long been critical of Meta for alleged instances of politically biased censorship against Republicans and conservatives.
Trump once supported a repeal of Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which gives social media companies legal immunity for what their users post.
If it were repealed, it would open the door for anyone to sue social media companies like Meta over controversial content on their sites. Lawsuits may also target attempts to moderate such content.
After the January 6 insurrection four years ago, Trump was suspended from Facebook for two years.
He was reinstated to the platform in 2023, months after Trump announced his third run for the White House, and was ultimately successful.
In July 2024, Meta completely removed all suspension fines from Trump’s accounts on Facebook and Instagram, citing the public’s need to hear from the presidential nominees.
Trump’s latest complaint about Meta came in July, after Facebook admitted it had accidentally censored an image of him with blood streaming down his ear after he was shot at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.
“Facebook just admitted that it wrongly censored Trump’s ‘attempted assassination photo’ and was caught,” Trump wrote on social media at the time.
“The same goes for Google,” he claimed. ‘They made it virtually impossible to find photos or anything about this heinous act. Both are facing major backlash over censorship claims.”