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Mark Zuckerberg’s Big Pivot

This week, Mark Zuckerberg took to Instagram to announce some policy changes at Meta, leaning the company away from fact-checking and towards a looser form of content moderation. The universe of social media commentators handled this in a very calm manner. Platformer’s headline said it was a precursor to genocide, while Garbage Day predicted it would lead to terrorism and non-consensual sexual materials. Progressives denounced the move as a surrender to Donald Trump, while conservatives hailed the move as a surrender to Donald Trump. So what’s actually happening?

The major changes are:

• Removing Meta’s fact checkers and replacing them with X-style Community Notes

• Permitting more controversial conservative viewpoints on culture war topics like gender, race, sexuality and immigration

• Shifting moderation filters to have fewer false positives at the cost of potentially missing some violations.

• Ending the policy of de-emphasizing political posts

• Moving moderation teams from California to Texas

• Ending Meta’s internal DEI programs

Let’s talk about what this all means. Amidst the hysteria about how this will cause terrorism, genocide,¹ and the return of your Uncle Greg oversharing his colonoscopy results, we can actually learn a few things. There are three big questions: What is the the history behind how we got to this point? Why is Zuckerberg is acting now? And what does this mean in a practical sense for Meta’s platforms?