Mark Zuckerberg capitulated to Donald Trump

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is making big changes to the social media platforms he runs, all in line with the wishes of President-elect Donald Trump and his supporters.

The use of fact-checkers that conservatives criticize is going away. A more relaxed regulation for the posting of conservative opinions is coming.

In his announcement, Zuckerberg said, "The recent election seems like a cultural tipping point toward a reorientation of the prioritization of speech," justifying relaxed content moderation rules on Facebook, Instagram and Threads. "Governments and traditional media have pushed to censor everything," Zuckerberg said, reiterating a right-wing view used to undermine fact-checking.

As Meta is a dominant force in the social media industry, with billions of users on its platforms worldwide, these changes will impact more broadly, shaping entire parts of the internet in ways that suit the views of MAGA.

Last week's announcements appeared to be aimed directly at Trump, especially after Meta broke the news exclusively on "Fox & Friends," one of the president-elect's favorite shows.

Meta's recently promoted policy chair, Joel Kaplan, a former senior adviser to George W. Bush, sat down with the Fox moderators and agreed wholeheartedly with the show's framework of "censorship" and "freedom."

Kaplan's participation in the show was another sign of Meta's reorientation ahead of Trump's second term.

Trump and some of his allies have been harsh critics of Zuckerberg and Facebook in the past. Trump has accused Zuckerberg of meddling in the election and threatened to send him to prison for "the rest of his life."

Meta also has many business issues before the US government. The Federal Trade Commission has an antitrust case against the company expected to go to trial in April.

Meta seems to be trying to appeal to the incoming administration.

Zuckerberg, touching on two popular right-wing topics, said the company would "remove a lot of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are out of touch with the mainstream discourse."

The company will also end partnerships with outside fact-checking groups and move to a system similar to X's "community notes." Zuckerberg claimed that "fact-checkers have become too politicized and have destroyed more trust." than they have created, especially in the USA".

In general, Meta will be much more forthcoming about content on Facebook and other platforms.

"We want to reverse the expansion of the mission that has made our rules too limited and too prone to overreach," Kaplan wrote in a blog post.

The meta will relax the rules and "adjust our systems to require a much higher degree of trust before a piece of content is removed," Kaplan added.

Conservatives immediately welcomed Meta's change, while others, including disinformation experts, warned that Meta's platforms would become even more spaces for false and hateful content.

Changes may also lead to outages in some media. As journalist Jane Lytvynenko noted at Bluesky, Facebook and Google are "the main funders of fact-checking organizations" around the world, and "there are newsrooms that survive on that funding."

"For those who use the platforms, this means that they will again be on their own to distinguish what is real information and what is not," Lytvynenko added.

Some commentators predicted that Zuckerberg's announcements would accelerate the adoption of alternative social networks like Bluesky. Others suggested that ordinary users might not notice the difference.

At the end of his video, Zuckerberg said Meta is "going back to civic content," meaning the company will change its algorithms so users can see more posts about elections, politics and social issues.

"For a while, the community asked to see less politics because it was causing them stress, so we stopped recommending these posts," he said. "But it seems we're in a new era now, and we're starting to get feedback that people want to see this content again." Political posts are often divisive, but Meta will work "to keep communities friendly and positive," he added.

Kaplan said the company will take a more "personalized" approach to those users who want more political content and will be able to see it in their news feeds. This change highlights how much power the Meta has amassed. (A2 Televizion)