Meta's right turn on red: Zuckerberg turns toward MAGA

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently announced sweeping changes to the company's content moderation strategy, signaling a shift toward a more MAGA-friendly approach. It's a marked change from when the CEO banned President-elect Donald Trump from his platforms four years ago. Now, Zuckerberg seems keen to show Trump he's ready to play nice.

The social media company is getting rid of third-party fact-checkers because they have been "too politically biased," were error-prone and "have destroyed more trust than they've created," Zuckerberg said in the announcement, echoing the sentiments of some of its conservative critics. Meta will replace fact-checkers with community notes similar to those on X, owned by Elon Musk, with whom Zuckerberg publicly feuded. The company is also losing its rules against hate speech, clearing the way for users to post a "wide array of derogatory remarks about races, nationalities, ethnic groups, sexual orientations, and gender identities," The Intercept said, referring to leaked training materials. Zuckerberg will also follow in Musk's footsteps by moving some of his operations from California to Texas. At the same time, Meta named vocal Trump ally and UFC boss Dana White to its board of directors days after promoting Joel Kaplan, a Republican lobbyist for the company, to be its new head of global affairs.

All these moves indicate a rightward shift for Meta, as Zuckerberg joins the other leaders of Big Tech trying to curry favor with the president-elect and his cohort. A more free-speech-friendly Facebook and Instagram could significantly change the ethos of the digital world, but for now, Meta's actions are stirring up plenty of discourse.

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'Hardly a foolproof business plan'

With this pivot, Zuckerberg is clearly trying to "insulate Meta from Trump's looming corporate retribution tour," said Allison Morrow at CNN. Still, he is also "courting a potential disaster if Meta's advertisers flee and users begin to associate the brand," which is "already tarnished by AI slop and a yearslong dearth of innovation," with the "kinds of unsavory characters who now dominate X." These moves may buy Meta some "insurance going into an era of Trump 2.0," but its repositioning is "hardly a foolproof business plan." Some of the decisions seem to model how Musk remade Twitter into X, which has led to some advertisers fleeing, alongside users for competitors like Bluesky and Meta's Threads.

Zuckerberg's decision to move the trust, safety, and content moderation teams from California to Texas is another indicator of a "MAGA element" to the changes at Meta, Steven Levy said at Wired. This move "simply anchors Meta's content arbiters in a location with a potentially different bias" than the bias he claimed precipitated it. It is also a "conspicuous statement" that Zuckerberg might "consider California — Trump's kryptonite — as a less savory place to work than deep-red Texas."

'Opening the door to unchecked hateful disinformation'

With Meta's new crowdsourced take on content moderation, some advocates worry that "harmful content might spread unhindered on Meta's platforms," said The Verge. The company is saying it is "up to you to spot the lies on its platforms" and that it is "not their problem if you can't tell the difference, even if those lies, hate, or scams end up hurting you," Imran Ahmed, CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, said to The Verge. The shift in content moderation policy is a "huge step back for online safety, transparency, and accountability" that could have "terrible offline consequences in the form of real-world harm."

By abandoning fact-checking, Meta is "opening the door to unchecked hateful disinformation about already targeted communities like Black, brown, immigrant and trans people," which "too often leads to offline violence," Nicole Sugerman, campaign manager at the nonprofit Kairos that works to counter race and gender-based hate online, said to The Verge.

In many ways, you "can't blame Zuckerberg for bending the knee to Donald Trump," Chris Stokel-Walker said at The Guardian. The problem is that "his decision has huge ramifications." This could be an "extinction-level event for the idea of objective truth on social media," an "organism that was already on life support." Everything seems turned around. "Meta is X. Mark Zuckerberg is Elon Musk," the outlet said. "Buckle in for a turbulent, vitriolic and fact-free four years online."