News

The doublespeak was hurting my brain, translating below:

Meta will get rid of factcheckers, “dramatically reduce the amount of censorship” and recommend more political content on its platforms, including Facebook, Instagram and Threads, founder Mark Zuckerberg has announced.

In a video message, Zuckerberg vowed to prioritise free speech after the return of Donald Trump to the White House and said that, starting in the US, he would “get rid of factcheckers and replace them with community notes similar to X”.

Translation: Trump has lowered the bar, and we're not going to waste time with higher standards than the lowest.

Zuckerberg said Meta’s “factcheckers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created”. The tech firm’s content moderation teams will be moved from California to Texas “where there is less concern about the bias of our teams”, he said. He admitted that changes to the way Meta filters content would mean “we’re going to catch less bad stuff”.

Translation: The fact checkers destroyed the trust of right-wing cultists who do not trust reality. So to solve this, we removed the fact-checkers, so the cultists are free to further radicalize themselves and others without the burden of reality. We're also moving the team to Texas, which is famously representative of how the country thinks (if you are a conservative).

Meta has more than 3 billion users globally. In a wide-ranging statement, Zuckerberg said Meta would also “get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse” and “work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world that are going after American companies and pushing to censor more”.

Translation: We're going to try our best to please Trump, starting with allowing hate speech on immigration and gender.

He cited Europe as a place with “an everincreasing number of laws institutionalising censorship and making it difficult to build anything innovative” and said: “Latin American countries have secret courts that can order companies to quietly take things down.”

Translation: Europe has rules and holds us accountable. We don't like rules and much prefer just being accountable to Trump, who doesn't care what we do as long as we make him look good.

In his five-minute statement, Zuckerberg said: “Governments and legacy media have pushed to censor more and more. A lot of this is clearly political, but there’s also a lot of legitimately bad stuff out there, drugs, terrorism, child exploitation. These are things that we take very seriously, and I want to make sure that we handle responsibly.

“So we built a lot of complex systems to moderate content, but the problem with complex systems is they make mistakes, even if they accidentally censor just 1% of posts, that’s millions of people, and we’ve reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship. The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards, once again, prioritising speech.”

He said that removing some restrictions on content on topics such as gender and immigration would “make sure that people can share their beliefs and experiences on our platforms” and he said the focus of filters that scan posts for policy violations would be shifted to only tackling illegal and high severity violations with Meta, relying on users to report lower severity violations before it takes action.

Translation: Beliefs and experiences drive more engagement than facts. The recent elections proved that facts no longer matter to most people. We now only care about beliefs and experiences, unless the law makes us do otherwise.