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Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg defended his decision to scale back Meta’s content moderation policies on Friday appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast. Zuckerberg faced widespread criticism for the decision, including by employees in their own company.
“It probably depends on who you ask,” Zuckerberg said when asked how Meta’s updates have been received.
U Key Meta updates announced this week were that he would end his independent fact-checking program and replace it with a community notes program like X has. This means that Facebook, Instagram and Threads rely more on community members to report misinformation. The company also said it will increase the thresholds for its automated content filters. This means that fewer bad posts on Meta platforms will be automatically removed, but also that fewer good posts will go wrong. And Meta did not announce this, but It is said to eliminate their greatest DEI effort.
In a wide-ranging and candid conversation that lasted nearly three hours, Zuckerberg explained why he is pivoting his social media platforms, as he says, back to his roots of free expression.
“You only start one of these companies if you believe in giving people a voice,” said Meta’s CEO. “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. The first elected president he claimed that the CEO of Meta plotted against him in the 2020 electionsand said he threatened Zuckerberg with jail 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 noted how important it is to have a government that defends American technology companies abroad, apparently referring the scrutiny Meta faced in the European Union.
However, Zuckerberg stated that the timing of these changes was purely coincidental, and that there is never a good time for major content moderation changes. In fact, Meta’s CEO said that these changes have been a long time coming.
“I was really concerned from the beginning about becoming this kind of decision maker of what’s true in the world,” Zuckerberg said. “It’s kind of a crazy position to be in for billions of people using your service.”
Over the past decade, Meta’s CEO says people have started pushing for ideological censorship on their platforms. He specifically referred to two events where this came to a head: the 2016 election for the president of the United States and the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.
Zuckerberg said the Biden administration pressured him to release the real information. Meta’s CEO said some of the concerns about vaccine side effects that Meta dismissed at the time should not be dismissed as misinformation.
The CEO of Meta told Rogan that X and Twitter “have just done better than us” on the topic of content moderation, noting how their platforms have adopted the community notes feature. In particular, many advertisers have left X in recent years due to its content moderation policiesan exodus that X is now being challenged in court such as collusion.
Rogan and Zuckerberg went from moderating content to a wide range of topics during Friday’s episode, including jiu-jitsu, AI, and broader changes in American culture.
Meta’s CEO said he sees a sea change happening, where people trust government officials and the established media less. In their place, social media creators and podcast hosts, like Rogan himself, are gaining influence and trust.
This sentiment is reflected in Meta’s recent changes to the news on its platforms, in which the company briefly. stopped promoting news or political content in all. However, Zuckerberg signaled this week that he had retrieve this political content to their promotional algorithms.
At another point, Zuckerberg noted how Western society, and especially corporate America, has become “emasculated” and “castrated.” He defended the need for a more masculine presence in the country and its businesses.
Several times throughout the podcast, Zuckerberg suggested that he deferred too much to the media over the past 10 years, and took the blame for things beyond his control. This is not the first time that Zuckerberg has said that Meta will take less responsibility for all the evil on his advancing platform. However, he seemed more sincere and encouraged about the topic than ever in the conversation on Friday.
“We just got to this point where there were things you couldn’t say (on our platforms) that were mainstream speech,” Zuckerberg said, referring to how Meta silenced conservative voices.
The CEO of Meta said how Trump’s nominee for secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, has repeatedly stated that women should not be allowed to serve in combat roles. Zuckerberg said that under Meta’s previous content moderation rules, these comments would not be allowed because they exclude a protected category of people. Under Meta’s new policies, these comments will be fine, Zuckerberg said.
“If it’s okay to say it on the floor of Congress, you should probably be able to debate it on social media,” he said.
On Dana White, the CEO of Meta said that 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 who are putting a lot of pressure on our company and we need strong people who are going to advise us on how to handle these situations,” Zuckerberg said on White.
