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Facebook creator and Meta CEO Mark “Zuck” Zuckerberg shook the world again today when he announced sweeping changes to the way his company moderates and handles user-generated posts and content in the U.S.
Citing the “recent elections” as a “cultural tipping point,” Zuck explained in a roughly five-minute-long video posted to his Facebook and Instagram accounts this morning (Tuesday, January 7) that Meta would cease using independent third-party fact checkers and fact-checking organizations to help moderate and append notes to user posts shared across the company’s suite of social networking and messaging apps, including Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Threads.
Instead, Zuck said that Meta would rely on a “Community Notes” style approach, crowdsourcing information from the users across Meta’s apps to give context and veracity to posts, similar to (and Zuck acknowledged this in his video) the rival social network X (formerly Twitter).
Zuck cast the changes as a return to Facebook’s “roots” in free expression, and a reduction in over-broad “censorship.” See the full transcript of his remarks at the bottom of this article.
Why this policy change matters to businesses
With more than 3 billion users across its services and products worldwide, Meta remains the largest social network to date. In addition, as of 2022, more than 200 million businesses worldwide, most of them small, used the company’s apps and services — and 10 million were active paying advertisers on the platform, according to one executive.
Meta’s new chief global affairs officer Joe Kaplan, a former deputy chief of staff for Republican President George W. Bush — who recently took on the role in what many viewed as a signal to lawmakers and the wider world of Meta’s willingness to work with the GOP-led Congress and White House following the 2024 election — also published a note to Meta’s corporate website describing some of the changes in greater detail.
Already, some business executives such as Shopify’s CEO Tobi Lutke have seemingly embraced the announcement. As Lutke wrote on X today: “Huge and important change.”
Founders Fund chief marketing officer and tech influencer Mike Solana also hailed the move, writing in a post on X: “There’s already been a dramatic d …