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
Zuckerberg 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
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.
Zuckerberg recently donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund, in a complete reversal on past relations between the two.
The policy change, and the donation come after Zuckerberg sat down with the President-elect for dinner in Mar-a-Lago in November.
Trump and Zuckerberg are seen here meeting inside the Oval Office in September of 2019
On Monday, Zuckerberg added Dana White to Meta’s board of directors in another olive branch to Trump.
Last week, Meta also named Joel Kaplan, an executive with deep GOP connections, as its 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 provides legal immunity to social media companies over what its users post.
If it were repealed, this would open the door for anyone to sue social media companies like Meta for controversial content on their sites. Lawsuits could also target attempts to moderate such content.
Following the January 6 insurrection four years ago, Trump was suspended from Facebook for two years.
On Monday, Zuckerberg added Dana White to Meta’s board of directors in another olive branch to Trump
He was reinstated on the platform in 2023 months after Trump announced his third run for the White House, which was ultimately successful.
By July 2024, Meta fully removed all suspension penalties from Trump’s accounts on Facebook and Instagram, citing the public’s need to hear from nominees for president.
Trump’s latest gripe with Meta came in July, after Facebook admitted they mistakenly censored an image of him with blood running down his ear after he was shot at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.
‘Facebook has just admitted that it wrongly censored the Trump “attempted assassination photo,” and got caught,’ Trump posted on social media at the time.
‘Same thing for Google,’ he claimed. ‘They made it virtually impossible to find pictures or anything about this heinous act. Both are facing big backlash over censorship claims.’
This article was originally published by a www.dailymail.co.uk . Read the Original article here. .