Zuckerberg Turns Facebook Full MAGA and Smears California Staff
Mark Zuckerberg announced Tuesday that Meta will scrap its fact-checking program and move content moderation staff from California to Texas “where there’s less concern about the bias of our teams.”
Zuckerberg, who was one of several tech billionaires to bend the knee to Donald Trump following the election, also said Meta would copy one of the main changes Trump ally Elon Musk made after his takeover of Twitter.
“We’re going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies and restoring free expression on our platforms,” Zuckerberg said in the video posted on Facebook Tuesday morning. “More specifically, we’re going to get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with Community Notes similar to X, starting in the U.S.”
The Facebook founder—whose company recently donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund and announced that Trump advocate UFC President Dana White would join its board of directors—also seemed to suggest that staffers in California could be perceived to be politically biased, unlike those in Texas.
“We’re going to move our trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California, and our U.S.-based content review is going to be based in Texas,” Zuckerberg said. “As we work to promote free expression, I think that it will help us build trust to do this work in places where there is less concern about the bias of our teams.”
In a post on Threads, Zuckerberg added that the move from California to Texas would help “remove the concern that biased employees are overly censoring content.”
Zuckerberg even deployed MAGA parlance in his Facebook address as he criticized “governments and legacy media” for allegedly pushing “to censor more and more.”
“The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards, once again, prioritizing speech,” he said in the clip announcing the end of the third-party fact-checking program. Meta launched the program shortly after Trump’s 2016 election victory amid intense scrutiny around the spread of inaccurate information on its platform.
The outgoing Meta program works with independent, International Fact-Checking Network-certified fact-checkers who identify, review and rate viral information across Meta’s platforms. Going forward, it will be up to users to flag and add notes to misleading posts.
“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,” Meta’s new Chief Global Affairs Officer, Joel Kaplan, said in a statement. “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.”
Discussing the changes on Fox & Friends Tuesday morning, Kaplan again cited political bias in explaining why Meta was ditching its independent fact-checkers. “It has become clear there is too much political bias in what they choose to fact-check because, basically, they get to fact-check whatever they see on the platform,” he said.
He also specifically praised Elon Musk.
“I think Elon’s played an incredibly important role in moving the debate and getting people refocused on free expression, and that’s that’s been really constructive and productive, and we’re just glad that we’ve got the opportunity now to make these kind of changes and to get back to our roots in free expression,” Kaplan said.
The recent announcement marks a shift away from previously icy relations between Zuckerberg and the incoming president. In a book published last year, Trump accused the Meta chief of plotting against him during the 2020 election and said Zuckerberg would “spend the rest of his life in prison” if it happened again.
