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Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Friday defended his decision to reduce Meta’s content moderation policy appearing on Joe Rogan’s podcast. Zuckerberg faced a lot of criticism for the decision, including from employees within their own company.
“It probably depends on who you ask,” Zuckerberg said when asked how Meta’s updates were received.
The key updates Meta announced this week were that it was ending its independent fact-checking program and replacing it with a community annotation program like X has. That means Facebook, Instagram, and Threads will rely more on community members to flag misinformation. The company also said it would increase the thresholds for its automated content filters. This means that fewer bad posts on Meta’s platforms will be automatically removed, but also that fewer good posts will be mistakenly removed. And Meta did not announce this, but supposedly eliminating its biggest DEI effort.
In a wide-ranging, candid conversation that lasted nearly three hours, Zuckerberg explained why he is turning his social media platforms back to what he says is their roots of free expression.
“You can only start one of these companies if you believe in giving people a voice,” CEO Meta said. “The whole point of social media is basically to give people the ability to share what they want. It goes back to our original mission to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.”
It is impossible to ignore the timing of these decisions. Zuckerberg announced these changes just days before Donald Trump’s inauguration. Previously elected president claimed that Meta’s CEO was conspiring against him in the 2020 electionsand allegedly threatened Zuckerberg with prison if he ever did it again.
When it comes to Trump, Zuckerberg said he’s pretty optimistic about the incoming president because he “just wants America to win.” The CEO emphasized the importance of having a government that defends American tech companies abroad, seemingly referencing it the scrutiny that Meta faced in the European Union.
However, Zuckerberg claimed that the timing of these changes was purely coincidental and that it is never a good time to make major changes in content moderation. In fact, Meta’s CEO said these changes were long overdue.
“I was really worried from the beginning that I would become the one who decides what is true in the world,” Zuckerberg said. “It’s a bit of a crazy position for the billions of people who use your service.”
In the past decade, Meta’s CEO says people have started advocating for ideologically-based censorship on his platforms. He specifically referred to two events where this came to a head: the 2016 US presidential election and the start of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic.
Zuckerberg said the Biden administration pressured them to remove the truthful information. Meta’s CEO said some of the concerns about vaccine side effects raised by Meta at the time should not have been dismissed as misinformation.
The Meta CEO told Rogan that X and Twitter “have done it better than us” on the topic of content moderation, noting that his platforms will adopt a community notes feature. Especially, several advertisers have left X in recent years due to its content moderation policyexodus which X is now challenging in court as a secret agreement.
Rogan and Zuckerberg veered from moderating content to a wide range of topics during Friday’s episode, including jiu-jitsu, artificial intelligence and broader changes in American culture.
Meta’s CEO said he sees a big change happening, where people trust government officials and established media less. In their place, social media creators and podcast hosts, like Rogan himself, are gaining influence and trust.
That sentiment is reflected in Meta’s recent move to news on its platforms, in which the company briefly stopped promoting news or political content in total. However, Zuckerberg signaled this week that he would reintroduce this political content with its promotional algorithms.
At another point, Zuckerberg noted how Western society, and corporate America in particular, had become “entrenched” and “neutered.” He defended the need for a more masculine presence in the country and its businesses.
Several times during the podcast, Zuckerberg suggested that he had pandered too much to the media over the past 10 years and taken the blame for things that were out of his control. This is not the first time that Zuckerberg has said that Meta will take on less responsibility for all the bad on its platform going forward. However, in the conversation on Friday, he appeared more honest and brave on the subject than ever before.
“We just got to this point where there are things you just can’t say [on our platforms] that were mainstream discourse,” Zuckerberg said, referring to how Meta has silenced conservative voices.
The CEO of Meta stated that Trump’s candidate for Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, is more than once stated that women should not be allowed to serve in combat roles. Zuckerberg said that under Meta’s previous content moderation rules, those comments would not have been allowed because they excluded a protected category of people. Under Meta’s new policies, those comments will be fine, Zuckerberg said.
“If it’s okay to say in Congress, you should probably be able to debate it on social media,” he said.
Of Dana White, Meta’s CEO said he added the UFC president to his board of directors because of his entrepreneurial leadership and to have more people with a “strong backbone” in his company.
“We have a lot of governments and people around the world putting a lot of pressure on our company, and we need strong people to advise us on how to deal with those situations,” Zuckerberg said on White.
