Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg defended his decision to scale back Meta’s content moderation policies in an appearance Friday on Joe Rogan’s podcast. Zuckerberg faced widespread criticism for the decision, including from employees within his company.
“Maybe it depends on who you ask,” Zuckerberg said when asked how the Meta updates were received.
The main updates that Meta announced this week were that it was ending its independent fact-checking program and replacing it with a community notes program like X has. This means that Facebook, Instagram, and Threads will be supported more to community members to report misinformation. The company also said it would raise 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 be mistakenly removed. And Meta didn’t announce it, but it is said to be eliminating DEI’s biggest effort.
In a wide-ranging and candid conversation that lasted nearly three hours, Zuckerberg explained why he is returning his social media platforms to what he says is their free expression roots.
“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 empower people 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 president-elect previously claimed that the Meta CEO conspired against him in the 2020 election and reportedly threatened Zuckerberg with prison if he did it again.
When it came to Trump, Zuckerberg said he was quite optimistic about the incoming president because he “just wants America to win.” The CEO noted how important it is to have a government that protects American tech companies abroad, noting the scrutiny Meta has faced in the European Union.
However, Zuckerberg maintained 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 chief executive said that these changes have been a long time coming.
“I was really concerned from the beginning about becoming this kind of arbiter of what’s true in the world,” Zuckerberg said. “That’s a crazy position to be in for billions of people using your service.”
In the last decade, Meta’s CEO says people have started pushing for ideological censorship on his platforms. He specifically referred to two events where this came to a head: the 2016 US presidential election and the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.
Zuckerberg said the Biden administration pressured them to remove the real information. Meta’s CEO said some of the concerns about vaccine side effects that Meta dismissed at the time should not have been dismissed as misinformation.
Meta’s CEO told Rogan that X and Twitter “just did it better than us” on the topic of content moderation, noting how his platforms would adopt the community notes feature. Notably, some advertisers left X in recent years because of its content moderation policies, an exodus that X is now challenging in court 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 mainstream media less. Instead, social media creators and podcast hosts, like Rogan himself, are gaining influence and credibility.
That sentiment is reflected in Meta’s recent shifts in news on its platforms, in which the company briefly stopped promoting news or political content. However, Zuckerberg signaled this week that it would return this political content to its promotion algorithms.
At another point, Zuckerberg noted how Western society, and especially corporate America, has become “masked” and “castrated.” He advocated the need for a more masculine presence in the country and its businesses.
Several times during the podcast, Zuckerberg suggested that he has been pushed too much in the media in the last 10 years and has taken the blame for things outside of his control. This isn’t the first time Zuckerberg has said Meta would take less responsibility for anything wrong with its platform going forward. However, he appeared more candid and bold on the subject than ever before in Friday’s conversation.
“We just got to this point where there were things you just couldn’t say (on our platforms) that were mainstream discourse,” Zuckerberg said, referring to how Meta has silenced conservative voices.
The Meta CEO pointed out 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 rules for content moderation, these comments would not be allowed because they exclude a protected category of people. Under Meta’s new policies, those comments will be OK, Zuckerberg said.
“If it’s okay to say it on the floor of Congress, maybe you should be able to argue it on social media,” he said.
Regarding 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 some strong people to advise us on how to handle these situations,” Zuckerberg told White.
