• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, January 7, 2025

In a post on Meta platforms this morning, Mark Zuckerberg announced the company will discontinue fact-checking content posted on its sites and apps, and would become more like the kind of "free speech" platform X has morphed into since Elon Musk acquired Twitter.

Characterizing the outcome of the presidential election as feeling like a "cultural tipping point," Zuckerberg said Meta will be working with Donald Trump to promote his brand of free speech around the world, and even gave props to co-president-elect Elon Musk, explaining why Meta is adopting X's model:

"We are now changing this approach. We will end the current third party fact checking program in the United States and instead begin moving to a Community Notes program. 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. We think this could be a better way of achieving our original intention of providing people with information about what they’re seeing – and one that’s less prone to bias."

He even noted that Meta is in the process of moving its "trust and safety teams that write our content policies" from California to "Texas and other U.S. locations."

Interestingly, Zuckerberg didn't show any signs of being a hostage victim, but generally speaking, he rarely shows signs of anything.

In any case, Meta's capitulation is the latest in a series of big billionaire controlled media and platforms that have begun supplicating to Trump, beginning with Jeff Bezos' decision to scuttle The Washington Post's endorsement of Kamala Harris just before the election and it has ramped up ever since.

"Mainstream media" aside, Meta's move is the most serious abandonment of safeguards to date, because it reaches more than 3 billion active users, while X reaches about a fifth of that.

The move means the only big social media platforms yet to capitulate are Google's YouTube, and ByteDance's TikTok, which is only days away from either being banned (did someone say "free speech") in the U.S., or spun off to a U.S.-based entity with an as-yet-unknown political bent.

The most telling part of Zuckerberg's remarks this morning is when he said, "A lot of this is clearly political."

No doubt.

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