Mark Zuckerberg Goes Musk

The founder of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, has announced substantial changes to the way that his company’s two most popular products, the social media networks Facebook and Instagram, will be moderated going forward. In a video published Tuesday morning, Zuckerberg committed to “simplifying our policies and restoring free expression on our platforms.” Among the planned changes are to get “rid of fact checkers and replace them with community notes similar to X”; to move all content-moderation teams from California to Texas; to accept that certain propositions in the realms of “gender” and “immigration” are debatable — and ought to be debated online as much as “in Congress”; to tune the sites’ “content filters to require much higher confidence before taking down content”; and to work with the Trump administration to “push back on governments around the world that are going after American companies and pushing to censor more.” In short, Zuckerberg intends to follow the example that was set by Elon Musk after he bought Twitter. It seems that things can, indeed, change fast in tech.