Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a series of major changes to the company’s moderation policies and practices, saying the election felt like a “cultural tipping point.”

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a series of major changes to the company’s moderation policies and practices Tuesday, citing a shifting political and social landscape and a desire to embrace free speech. Zuckerberg said Meta will end its fact-checking program with trusted partners and replace it with a community-driven system similar to X’s Community Notes. The company is also changing its content moderation policies around political topics and undoing changes that reduced the amount of political content in user feeds, Zuckerberg said. The changes will affect Facebook and Instagram, two of the largest social media platforms in the world, each boasting billions of users, as well as Threads.

Beyond the end of the fact-checking program, Zuckerberg said, the company will eliminate some content policies around immigration, gender and other hot-button issues and refocus its automated moderation systems on what he called “high severity violations,” relying on users to report other violations. Facebook will also move its trust and safety and content moderation team from California to Texas. Meta and social media companies broadly have in recent years reversed course on content moderation part because of the politicization of moderation decisions and programs. Republicans have long criticized Meta’s fact-checking system and fact-checking in general as unfair and favouring Democrats — a claim that is in dispute. Conservatives have celebrated X’s Community Notes system, which CEO Elon Musk has used to replace the company’s previous efforts around misinformation, and it has allowed for a mixture of fact-checking, trolling and other community-driven behaviour. 

CEOs and business leaders across sectors are currying favour with the incoming administration of President-elect Donald Trump. Meta, along with other tech companies, donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund, and ahead of the election, Zuckerberg praised Trump in an interview with Bloomberg Television without offering an outright endorsement. Ahead of Trump’s inauguration, Meta has reportedly appointed Republican Joel Kaplan to lead its policy team, and Monday, its announced that UFC’s Dana White, a longtime supporter of Trump’s, would join its board.