CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been quietly shifting toward a Republican-favored strategy for his leadership of social media giant Meta, announcing on Tuesday that he’s replacing a trusted fact-checking program with community notes, removing restrictions on topics like immigration and gender, and moving the company’s “trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California, and our U.S. content review to Texas.” The changes mirror many of those made in recent months by Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter), and it will affect both Facebook and Instagram, per NBC News.
He wrote on Threads — the company’s attempt at a Twitter dupe — that the move to Texas “will help remove the concern that biased employees are overly censoring content.” (Guess no one told Zuck about the biases happening in Texas towards women, people of color, immigrants, and the LGBTQIA+ community.)
“It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression on Facebook and Instagram,” Zuckerberg said on a video posted to Facebook. “I started building social media to give people a voice. Governments and legacy media have pushed to censor more and more.” To be clear, actual research contends that conservatives are not unfairly censored on social media. Despite this, Republicans have long criticized fact-checking in general — and Meta’s fact-checking system in particular — as unfair and favoring Democrats, NBC reported.
During a Senate hearing in 2019, Texas’ sweetheart Sen. Ted Cruz told fellow lawmakers: “Not only does big tech have the power to silence voices with which they disagree, but big tech likewise has the power to collate a person’s feed so they only receive the news that comports with their own political agenda,” Cruz said, according to a Washington Post article that year.
In 2020, Zuckerberg told lawmakers on Capitol Hill that Facebook’s goal is to “make sure that people have reliable information about the election,” according to Politico.
Is Zuckerberg bowing down to the incoming Trump administration? Or was this always Zuck’s plan? Here’s what we know: He’s already donated $1 million to soon-to-be President Trump’s inaugural fund, and, earlier this week, Zuckerberg put Joel Kaplan — a Republican and a Brett Kavanaugh supporter — on its global policy team. He’s also put Dana White, the Ultimate Fighting Championship president and a Trump ally, on Meta’s board. Though Zuckerberg never explicitly endorsed Trump ahead of the election, he did praise the former president in an interview with Bloomberg Television.
As Kat Vargas, the woman behind Howdy Politics, wrote on Threads, “Texans have been telling you that we would be ground zero for Project 2025 and that living in a blue state wouldn’t protect you. We told you that our problems would become yours if you continued to ignore Texas.”
So, see y’all on Bluesky?
Read more at NBC News.