Mark Zuckerberg, taking a play from Elon Musk’s X, is pledging to make his social media conglomerate, Meta, more free speech friendly — and the mainstream press is not happy about it. 

The new policy, which includes swapping out Meta’s existing fact-checking program for a more free-speech-forward “Community Notes” system a la Mr. Musk’s X, was introduced by Mr. Zuckerberg in a video statement on Tuesday morning. 

Among other reforms, the company will reduce censorship of hot-topic political issues that are prone to “over-enforcement” like immigration and gender identity. Mr. Zuckerberg also announced that Meta’s trust and safety and content moderation teams would be moving to Texas from California to “help remove the concern that biased employees are overly censoring content.” 

The billionaire chief executive justified the policy overhaul as an effort to “get back to our roots” and focus on “reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies and restoring free expression on our platforms.” The changes will affect Facebook, the world’s largest social media platform, along with Instagram, and Threads.

‘Garbage and Misinformation’

According to Axios’s two co-founders, Jim VandeHei and Michael Allen, the policy change “opens up most of social media as a Wild West of expression, where high-quality, trustworthy information will commingle with garbage and misinformation.” Axios’s business editor, Dan Primack, lambasted X’s community notes system, which Meta is slated to adopt, for “regularly” allowing “blatant misinformation to be loudly amplified for hours or days before being noted.” 

At CNN, correspondent Brian Stelter kicked the “sweeping changes” for being “all in line with the desires of President-elect Donald Trump and his supporters.” He reckons that Meta’s announcement was “addressed directly to Trump,” given that the company handed an exclusive about the policy change to “Fox and Friends” — “one of the president-elect’s favorite TV shows.” 

A similar assessment of Meta’s about-face is offered by MSNBC analyst, Tim Miller. While he maintains that “Facebook is essentially a senior citizen message board” — so “it’s not a big deal what they fact check” — he suggests that the Fox & Friends segment, which featured Meta’s new policy chief, Joel Kaplan, “reveals this to be not about 1st principles but kissing the autocrats ring.”

‘A Real Opportunity’ for Meta

During the interview in question, Mr. Kaplan, who has served as Meta’s most prominent conservative voice and proponent of free speech since his hiring in 2011, called President Trump’s return to office “a real opportunity” for Meta to restore their free speech “values.” Last week, Mr. Kaplan, a known Republican and former deputy chief of staff for policy under President George W. Bush, was promoted to chief global affairs officer, replacing his predecessor, Nick Clegg, a former left-wing British politician. 

Mr. Clegg’s ousting sent shock waves through the technology sector and appeared to fortify Meta’s rightward expansion. It’s now clear it was only the tip of the iceberg. On Monday, the House GOP’s deputy communications director under chairwoman Elise Stefanik, Francis Brennan, announced that he would be joining Meta’s strategic response team. The same day, Mr. Zuckerberg publicized his decision to appoint UFC’s chief executive, Dana White, a close confidant of Trump, to Meta’s board of directors. 

Meanwhile, Mr. Zuckerberg has been working from the sidelines to repair his fraught relationship with the president-elect. The Meta head ruffled feathers when he banned Trump from his social media platforms in light of the January 6 riots. Trump later accused the Meta head of “plotting” against his 2020 campaign by “steering” Facebook against his favor, and threatened Mr. Zuckerberg with spending “the rest of his life in prison” should he act similarly in 2024.

A Defrosting Relationship? 

Now, their relationship appears to be defrosting. In November, the influential chief executive dined with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago compound and reportedly gifted the president-elect a pair of Meta’s Ray Ban smart glasses. Mr. Zuckerberg also pledged, for the first time, to donate $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund. Leaders of other prominent technology companies, seeking artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency-friendly policies from the new administration, have followed suit. 

The influence of the current political environment did not go unaddressed in Meta’s announcement. Mr. Zuckerberg noted that the recent elections “feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech” and raised his concern that “governments and legacy media have pushed to censor more and more.” 

Even before Trump’s electoral victory, though, Mr. Zuckerberg began to sound the alarm on Meta’s content regulation practices. In a letter sent to the House Judiciary Committee over the summer, Mr. Zuckerberg acknowledged that the platform was “wrong” to capitulate to the Biden Administration’s pressure to censor certain posts related to the Covid-19 pandemic. He also expressed regret about Meta’s efforts to downplay the New York Post’s coverage of Hunter Biden and his infamous laptop ahead of the 2020 election in light of now-debunked concerns from the FBI that it was a Russian disinformation plot. 

Mr. Zuckerberg’s latest announcement offers similar introspection. In a rare acknowledgement of fault, he accepts that the current system “has resulted in too many mistakes and too much content being censored that shouldn’t have been” and promises to “undo the mission creep that has made our rules too restrictive and too prone to over-enforcement.” Fact checkers, he adds, “have just been too politically biased” and “destroyed more trust than they’ve created.”

‘Killing the Fact-Checking Industry’

Regardless of whether Meta’s new policy reflects Mr. Zuckerberg’s genuine interest in free speech, or is just an effort to curry favor with Trump, the reform is expected to have a major impact on the industry which has, for years, relied on fact-checking systems to regulate shared content. 

That’s corroborated by a former Facebook fact-check software engineer, Ian Haworth, now a conservative commentator, who called Mr. Zuckerberg’s announcement “huge” and predicted that he would be “killing the fact-checking industry.” Though Mr. Haworth describes fact-checking as a good idea in theory, he suggests that the industry ended up becoming “a money-making grift” that helped “left-wing activists push their own agendas.” He thus lauds the tech giant for “joining the side of free speech” and “signaling that Democrats don’t control Big Tech anymore.” 

He acknowledges, though, that if Vice President Harris won the election, “this probably wouldn’t be happening.” Mr. Haworth reasons: “But if that helps save free speech online, does the ‘why’ matter? Elections have consequences, and if this is one of those consequences, great!” 

The chief executive officer of X Corp., Linda Yaccarino, commended the decision as “a smart move by Zuck” and said that she expected other platforms to follow suit. “Fact-checking and moderation doesn’t belong in the hands of a few select gatekeepers who can easily inject their bias into decisions. It’s a democratic process that belongs in the hands of many,” she wrote on X. 

And how did Mr. Musk, the owner of X and infamous rival to Mr. Zuckerberg, respond to the news? “This is cool,” he shared on X.