Mark Zuckerberg Reshapes Meta in Donald Trump’s Image

• Meta’s content moderation changes aim to appease Donald Trump and conservative allies.
• Mark Zuckerberg’s moves follow efforts to align with Trump, including meetings and policy shifts.
• Meta’s new approach includes ending third-party fact-checking and demoting its Trust and Safety team.

Sometimes the obvious thing is the obvious thing.

Which is to say: You can make pro and con arguments for many of the massive changes Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced about the way his company is going to moderate — or not moderate — content. It’s a complicated topic.

But the most important takeaway is that all of Tuesday’s news has been rolled out specifically for Donald Trump, and the new political regime that officially kicks into gear on January 20.

That includes the language Zuckerberg and his company are using to describe the changes — like when Zuckerberg criticizes “legacy media” and declares that “the recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point” in a video posted Tuesday morning.

It includes the venue Meta used to announce the changes — Fox News, Trump’s favorite TV channel. And, of course, the changes themselves. We’ll get to those in a second.

But first, some crucial context: Tuesday’s news follows a series of moves Zuckerberg and Meta have made to make nice with Trump and Republicans, which began before November’s election.

A reminder of that timeline:

• In July, Zuckerberg praised Trump as a “badass” after surviving an assassination attempt.
• In August, Zuckerberg sent Republican Congresssman Jim Jordan a letter where he acknowledged moderation mistakes in the past.
• In November, Zuckerberg traveled to Mar-a-Lago for a postelection audience with Trump, then pledged $1 million to Trump’s inaugural committee.
• Last week Zuckerberg announced that he was replacing his head of policy: Nick Clegg, the former British politician, was out, replaced by Joel Kaplan, a longtime Republican.
• On Monday, Zuckerberg announced that he was adding Dana White, the head of the CEO of Ultimate Fighting Championship and a prominent Trump backer, to his board of directors.

Add it all up and there’s no way to see Zuckerberg’s moves as anything other than a straightforward attempt to please Trump and the incoming president’s conservative allies, who have often complained that Zuckerberg’s properties were biased against them. It’s crystal clear.

As far as the changes themselves: It’s entirely possible that some of the stuff Zuckerberg and his team announced Tuesday reflects what Zuckerberg actually believes. (I’ve asked Meta PR if Zuckerberg wants to expand on his comments.)

Figuring out the best way to moderate — or not moderate — giant platforms that depend on free contributions from their users has bedeviled all of the Big Tech companies for years. And Zuckerberg has never seemed comfortable with the various moderation layers and rules his company has added over time.*

He has also been signaling that he’s particularly unhappy about the way the company responded to criticism and regulation following the 2016 election and subsequent revelations like the Cambridge Analytica data breach.

So getting rid of third-party fact-checking of controversial posts in favor of the “Community Notes” system Elon Musk’s Twitter/X uses, might very well be what Zuckerberg thinks makes sense. It certainly fits a Silicon Valley ethos that’s much more comfortable using a combination of users and software to make decisions about what people see on those platforms, rather than asking executives to take responsibility for those calls.

The same goes for the demotion of Meta’s Trust and Safety team — which is most definitely what Zuckerberg intends by moving those operations from California to Texas, which, at a minimum, is an attrition play. Zuckerberg has long talked about wanting those roles to eventually become automated, and in the meantime, hiring humans to do that work has been difficult, messy, or worse. Simply doing less of it is one way to get at the problem. (Worth noting: In 2023, Meta investor and board member Marc Andreessen described Trust and Safety operations as part of “The Enemy” he wanted tech to fight back against.)

And figuring out how to run a platform that’s based in America but subject to regulation around the world is a problem that all US tech companies struggle with. You can imagine the appeal of Zuckerberg’s new approach — simply announcing that the rest of the world is anti-growth.

There will be a lot of devil in the details here. For instance, Zuckerberg certainly can’t fully adopt Elon Musk’s next-to-anything-goes approach for his companies. Unlike Musk, he isn’t in a position to scare off users and advertisers who want a clean, well-lit space.

But those are all details to hash out in the future. Tuesday’s news is simple: It’s Donald Trump’s world, and Mark Zuckerberg is living in it.

*Criticisms of Meta/Facebook’s moderation attempts don’t only come from the right. I always remember the prime minister of Norway, among others, complaining when Facebook took down posts that used a Pulitzer Prize-winning photo from the Vietnam War — a move Facebook first defended, then reversed.