Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has shifted the company dramatically to the right ahead of the inauguration of new President Donald Trump, with a series of policy and practice changes in the past week that have left some employees, users and advocacy groups in disarray.
Zuckerberg said some of the changes to Meta’s fact-checking and moderation systems were intended to curb censorship and protect free speech on its platforms, including Instagram and Facebook, but the scope of the changes goes well beyond moderation of social media and reportedly affects Meta’s internal processes. policies around the bathrooms and sign and on optional aesthetic theme that it previously implemented on one of its platforms to celebrate transgender people.
These are all the changes Meta has made in the past week.
Community Notes instead of third-party fact-checkers
Last Tuesday, Meta announced that it would be scrapping its old fact-checking system and replacing it with a system similar to X’s Community Notes that will be rolled out in the coming months, starting in the United States.
Introduced in 2016, Meta’s fact-checking system worked by posting certain information on its platforms through certified third-party fact-checkers who identified posts that appeared to be misinformation. However, Zuckerberg said the fact-checkers were “too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they have created.”
Under the new Community Notes system, users can write and review notes that can be added to posts, which can provide additional context that may be missing from the originals. In a press release announcing the changes, Meta said that before a note appears, “agreement is needed among people with a range of perspectives” to help combat potential biases.
Republicans have often expressed support for X’s Community Notes system; Many previously criticized Meta’s fact-checking system due to their belief that it disproportionately targets right-wing content. However, research has told a different story, suggesting that conservatives tend to share more misinformation, which in turn attracts moderation actions. Those opposing Meta’s changes fear they will allow misinformation to spread unchecked on its platforms.
Zuckerberg explained in a video on Facebook that Meta would also change its enforcement policies, saying the previous system’s shortcomings were responsible for the “vast majority of censorship” on its platforms. He said the new filtering system would specifically target illegal and “very serious” violations and that “lower serious violations” would be addressed through the new Community Notes system, which requires users to proactively report when messages may be out of context or contain incorrect information contain.
The announcement has drawn mixed reactions.
Many Meta employees have expressed concern about the decision to stop third-party fact-checking. One employee wrote on Workplace, the company’s internal communications tool, that he was “extremely concerned” about the decision, adding that it seemed like Meta was “sending a bigger, stronger message to people that facts no longer matter, and merged that with a victory for freedom of speech.”
Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva called the decision “extremely serious,” and the country’s attorney general has said it could take “legal and judicial action” against Meta if it does not explain its new fact-checking measures.
Many right-wing figures have welcomed the new system. Fox News reporter Brooke Singman reported that Trump responded by saying Meta “has come a long way.” SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk also praised the changes, writing “This is cool” on X.
More political content
In the video posted last Tuesday, Zuckerberg said Meta wants to welcome political discourse back to Facebook, Instagram and Threads.
“We’re bringing back citizen content,” Zuckerberg said in the video. “For a while the community was asking for less politics because it was stressing people out, so we stopped recommending these posts. But it feels like we’re in a new era now and we’re starting to get feedback that people want to see this content again.
He added that the recent election had a major influence on the company’s decision to change its fact-checking system and work to “prioritize speech.” He also added that it plans to work closely with the incoming Trump administration to “push back on governments around the world that are going after American companies and pushing for more censorship.”
“The only way we can reverse this global trend is with the support of the US government, which is why it has been so difficult over the past four years, when even the US government has pushed for censorship,” Zuckerberg said.
In 2021, before Meta began cutting back on its political content, a Brookings Institution study found that conservative-leaning podcasters who shared “false and misleading content” were often able to reach more than 28 million combined followers on Facebook and Twitter.
Relaxing rules around anti-LGBTQ rhetoric and ending Meta’s diversity programs
Meta informed its employees through an internal communications forum on Friday that it would be ending many of its programs aimed at hiring diverse candidates, including disbanding its diversity, equity and inclusion team and getting rid of its “Diverse Slate Approach” in its recruitment process.
The New York Times also reported that two Meta employees said Meta’s offices in Silicon Valley, Texas and New York had been ordered to remove tampons from their men’s restrooms, which had been made available to the company’s non-binary and transgender employees .
404 Media reported that Meta had removed non-binary and transgender themes from its Messenger app. The app’s ‘themes’ feature allows users to change the design and colors of their chats, with the ‘trans’ and ‘non-binary’ themes containing the colors of each of the transgender and non-binary flags. Meta had introduced the two themes in celebration of Pride Month, with the trans theme rolling out in June 2021 and the non-binary theme the following year.
Meta also updated its ‘Hateful Conduct’ policy, which now allows posts calling LGBTQ people mentally ill.
“We allow accusations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given the political and religious discourse surrounding transgenderism and homosexuality and the common non-serious use of words such as ‘weird’,” it said policy.
The Hateful Conduct policy allows users to post about “gender-based restrictions on military, law enforcement, and education jobs,” and use “sex- or gender-exclusive language” when describing “access to spaces often limited by sex or gender , such as access to restrooms, specific schools, specific military, law enforcement, or educational roles, and health or support groups.
Zuckerberg said in the video posted to Facebook that Meta would “simplify content policies” on topics such as gender and immigration.
“What started as a movement to be more inclusive is increasingly being used to shut down opinions and exclude people with different ideas, and that has gone too far,” he said. “I want to ensure that people can share their beliefs and experiences on our platforms.”
Meta’s Chief Global Affairs Officer, Joel Kaplan, similarly told Fox News that the previous system was “too restrictive” when it came to “sensitive topics like immigration, trans issues and gender.”
Notable departures and new recruitments
Former British Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg announced this month that he would step down as Meta’s president of global affairs after almost seven years. Kaplan, a Republican who served as White House deputy chief of staff, has stepped into the role.
Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO Dana White, a longtime Trump ally, will also join Meta’s board of directors, alongside John Elkann, CEO of Italian car holding company Exor, and former Microsoft chief strategy officer Charlie Songhurst.
In a press release from Meta, White said he was “not interested in joining a board of directors” until he was offered a spot on Meta’s board. 404 Media reported that Meta’s employees responded to the announcement of his addition with criticism and jokes at Workplace, which removed the company’s Internal Community Relations team because they believed the posts violated its Community Engagement Expectations ‘ of the company.
The day Meta announced it would end its diversity programs, its vice president for civil rights and deputy general counsel, Roy Austin, announced on Facebook that he would resign.
Jobs in a red state
Zuckerberg also said Meta’s trust, safety and content moderation teams would move from California to Texas.
“As we work to advance free expression, I believe this will help build trust to do this work in places where there are fewer concerns about our teams’ biases,” he said.
Following the announcement, former Meta employees wrote on social media platform Bluesky and Meta’s own platform Threads that Meta already had trust and safety moderation teams working in Austin, Texas.
Musk similarly moved the headquarters of SpaceX and X from California to Texas in July. That same month, the U.S. Supreme Court remanded to a lower court a case challenging the constitutionality of Texas and Florida laws that sought to regulate the content moderation practices of social media companies.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com